


strike gold on your eyelids

by getmean



Category: Papillon (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Introspection, M/M, Pining, Slow Burn, henri is their gardener/groundskeeper, louis is the rich bookish son of a doctor, set in 1950s-ish rural france
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-06
Updated: 2020-02-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:48:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 35,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22592005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/getmean/pseuds/getmean
Summary: It’s lonely, in this big house with only his parents and the staff for company. Most of Louis’ days are lost to reading, to drawing, to wandering around the streets of the village like he has somewhere he has to be, someone he has to meet. He watches the old men smoke and drink outside of the tabac-cum-bar that sits sleepy and dark on the main street, watches the old women chat outside the boulangerie with their bread clutched in their arms, fresh and fragrant in the still morning air.And now, Henri. Henri, with his shabby car and his big smile, impish like he’s in on some joke that he’s aching to include you in too.
Relationships: Henri "Papillon" Charriere/Louis Dega
Comments: 31
Kudos: 67





	1. Chapter 1

It’s a Wednesday, when they meet. Louis remembers it perfectly; he’d just rounded the street corner to begin the long walk up to the top of the hill where his parents’ house sits, choked in ivy beyond its tall wrought iron gates. June, and the air is thick with humidity. He remembers the scream of cicadas, the bead of sweat inching down his back, the way the air shimmers over the hot tarmac ahead of him. The distant sound of a two-stroke; someone strimming their garden, a madman out in the blistering midday sun just like him. His cigarette, stealing the breath from his lungs as he pants his way up the slope, and then the deadened afternoon peace is shattered by the roar of a struggling engine, and all Louis knows is the smell of exhaust, the hot breeze as the car races by him, and then it’s gone. 

In the wake of it, even the cicadas are quiet.

Louis stands stock still for a moment, watching the retreating back of the busted little yellow Fiat that had so startled him and every other living being in a ten mile radius. Even the two-stroke had ceased. But then the cicadas ratchet back up and Louis recalls where he is, and the afternoon rights itself again, and he resumes his slow path up the steep hill, the smell of dry grass and hot dirt in his nostrils. 

He does this daily; takes himself around the village just to give himself a breather from the stifling atmosphere of his parents’ home. Enough time to smoke a couple cigarettes and to get him sweating, and then he’s bracing his shoulder to the stiff front gate, the metal of it hot even though his shirt as it creaks its way open. It’s stiff; their last groundskeeper had left a few months ago, and ever since then the property has been falling into a state of vague disrepair that neither Louis nor his parents are equipped to do anything about. His father, Maurice, a prominent town physician. His mother, Celeste, a prominent drunk. And Louis, well. To quote his father: _all those damn books but nothing to show for it._ The gravel crunches under his shoes as he wanders up the drive, eyes on the overgrown borders, the uncut grass. He hadn’t had the guts to point out that his father had as many practical skills as Louis himself did, as the apple didn’t fall very far from the tree in his case. Or at least, he hoped. Louis preferred the idea of becoming a venomous bore in his later years over an equally venomous drunk. 

“Hello, Mama,” he says, now, bending to kiss said venomous drunk on each of her powdery, ruddy cheeks. She smells like lavender, like soap, and Pastis beyond that. Bitter aniseed. It always turns his stomach. “Where’s Dad?”

His mother makes a noise in the back of her throat; distracted indifference. Louis had obviously interrupted her afternoon drunken haze, sat as she is amongst the tall grass in her wicker chair. If Louis leans to the side just so, he can see the bottle of Pastis nestled in the shade of the little metal table holding her cigarettes, her empty glass, an untouched paperback. “Oh, inside,” she says, a hand on his forearm. “The boy is here to see about the groundskeeper position.”

“Already?” he asks, stepping out from under the shade of her parasol, eyes already on the house. It’s half-obscured by the huge, overgrown pine tree that always blankets the stone steps leading up to the front door in springy, aromatic needles, but if he cranes his neck Louis can just see beyond it; his father’s car, and a familiar boxy little Fiat pulled up haphazardly next to it. “Did he just arrive?” he adds, but gets no reply; his mother having settled her sunhat over her eyes and leaned back in her chair. Louis watches her for a moment longer, the slow rise and fall of her chest under her sundress, something melancholic but irritated stewing in his stomach until all he can do is turn away, jaw clenched as he makes for the house. 

The front door is open, but the shutters are pulled closed on all the windows; their housekeeper’s attempt at keeping the midday heat from the house, the sun from the old paintings inside. It gives the place an empty, abandoned look — the weathered, cornflower blue shutters like vast closed eyes. Louis ducks his head as he takes the steps to the door two at a time, passing over the bed of pine needles into the cool interior of the front passageway. His footsteps ring on the scuffed flagstones. Somewhere in the bowels of the house, he can hear voices.

“ — For about five years.”

“And before that?”

A laugh. Louis doesn’t recognise the voice; it’s deep and friendly, a sly edge of inner amusement to the speaker’s tone when he replies, “Here and there.”

Louis can sense his father’s quiet disapproval with that answer, and when he rounds the corner into the drawing room he can see it too; obvious in the purse of his mouth, the way his brow is furrowed. It’s a familiar look, though one that’s a little odd to see aimed at someone other than himself. 

“Marseilles,” the strange voice says, and pulls at Louis’ attention; he moves from his father’s sudden expression of approval to the man sat opposite him. Big, blonde. Close cropped hair and his arm spread along the back of Maurice’s sofa like he owns the place. Even from Louis’ position in the doorway, he can tell he smells like the outdoors, like sweat and sun and grass. “Well,” he adds, and shrugs. Louis glances away, and then back, unable to take him in in anything but small doses. “Marseilles area.”

Ignoring his amendment, Maurice smiles, and inclines his head. “Marseilles.” His voice is rich with satisfaction. “Louis was born there.” He gestures to the doorway, where Louis has been stood silent and, up until that point, unacknowledged. He startles, unaware his father had even noticed him. “My son.”

The stranger’s eyes swing around to him, then. Obviously he doesn’t have Maurice’s near preternatural powers to sense him, as there’s a small expression of surprise on his broad-cheekboned, handsome face; one that morphs almost instantly into a pleased, eye-crinkling smile as he meets Louis’ gaze. “Henri,” he says, and stands, the floor creaking loudly under his foot as he leans forward, hand outstretched for Louis to shake it. “Nice to meet you.”

Willing himself to sound measured, put together, Louis shakes his hand. Henri’s broad, work-roughened hand near swallows his own. “Louis,” he says, surprised to find his own grip stronger. Henri just smiles again, and they disconnect; Henri back to his seat, Louis back to the shadow of the doorway. He clenches his fingers in a fist, and releases them, the ghost of a touch against his palm.

“And in terms of your accommodation —” Maurice begins, and Louis melts away, treading lightly so as not to make his departure obvious. Henri’s open, handsome face follows him through the rest of the afternoon, long after the man had gotten into that little yellow car and left, long after the sun had sunk low in the sky and turned the evening cool and periwinkle blue. 

“Did he get the job?” he asks, over dinner; silent, save for the scraping of cutlery on plates, the clink of glasses. He lays his hand over the top of his wineglass as the servant steps forward to fill it, and she bounces past him to his mother, who barely glances up from the salmon en croute she’s pushing around her plate. At his father’s blank look, Louis adds, “Henri.”

Maurice’s brows raise, and he nods, eyes on his food as he replies, “Yes, we think so.” He looks to Celeste, distant and glazed at his elbow. “Don’t we?” She doesn’t respond any further than a nod, and Maurice goes back to his dinner, adding, “He seems like a good fit. Plenty of experience, even if he does seem a little,” he grimaces at his broccoli. “Flippant.”

 _Here and there_ , Louis thinks. That busted up Fiat roaring its way uphill. As casually as he can muster, he traces his thumbnail along the rim of his wineglass, and asks, “Is he staying in the cottage?” A ramshackle little building on the estate, just barely visible past the overgrown garden, now. 

Maurice hums. “Seems like he’s looking forward to it.” He laughs, setting down his cutlery and reaching for his glass. “God knows why.”

Later, when Louis and his parents have all gone their separate ways for the night, he lingers at his window, gazing out over the darkened grounds. From his bedroom window, Louis can just see the peak of the roof on the cottage, the rise of the crumbling chimney. The fact sends a little spark of pleasure through him. He wonders if Henri will keep to himself like their last groundskeeper, or whether he’ll insinuate himself into the ebb and flow of everyday life in the house like some of the other staff do. He can’t help but hope for the latter, for whatever reason he doesn’t care to put name to just yet. 

It’s lonely, in this big house with only his parents and the staff for company. Most of Louis’ days are lost to reading, to drawing, to wandering around the streets of the village like he has somewhere he has to be, someone he has to meet. He watches the old men smoke and drink outside of the tabac-cum-bar that sits sleepy and dark on the main street, watches the old women chat outside the boulangerie with their bread clutched in their arms, fresh and fragrant in the still morning air. Sometimes Louis feels like the only person under _fifty_ in the place, let alone under twenty-five.

And now, Henri. Henri, with his shabby car and his big smile, impish like he’s in on some joke that he’s aching to include you in too. When Louis tries to bury himself in a book for the night, he finds his attention diverted, oddly restless despite the lethargy that the long, hot day has weighing on him. For the first time in a while, he feels like there’s something interesting on the horizon, something beyond his parents expansive library downstairs, beyond his slow walks through the village. Something beyond the monotony he’s slipped into since he’d finished up with his degree.

He falls asleep with the light on, and wakes to the morning sun striping his face, mouth dry and cheek pressed to the pages of his book. For a moment he’s disorientated, confused, unsure why such a pit of excitement has opened up under his breastbone, and then he rolls to the side and his eyes fall on the tops of the trees he can see beyond his window, and knowing settles comfortably into him. _Here and there,_ he thinks, intrigue welling up behind his eyes.

———

Henri moves into the groundskeeper’s cottage at the end of the garden a week later, all of his earthly belongings strapped to the roof racks of his car, which comes trundling through the gates just past ten in the morning. Louis is eating a slow breakfast, nose in a book as he spoons yoghurt into his mouth, but his head pops up at the sound of tires on gravel outside the open dining room window. His father is away on a call-out. His mother is still in bed. With a rising kind of dread, it dawns on Louis that it’s _his_ responsibility to welcome this brand new member of staff to the property. 

Almost immediately after, he realises the state of undress he’s still in, and the embarrassment propels him upstairs and out of his robe and nightclothes in favour of a pair of jeans, a t-shirt. He’s out of breath by the time he stumbles out onto the porch, eyes squinted against the bright, late-morning sun. He throws his hand over his eyes, spotting Henri leaned up against the side of his car, head ducked over the lick of a flame. When he lifts his head, smoke follows him, hanging lazily in the still air. 

“Hello,” Louis calls, stupidly. He tugs on the front of the t-shirt he’d grabbed at random; one that he’s sure was destined for the bin, at some point. Too small around the chest, just flirting with the waistband of his jeans. It makes him feel self conscious for a split second, but then Henri smiles and all is forgotten. God, he thinks, that little Fiat looks even smaller with the man’s broad-shouldered bulk next to it. 

“Hey.” Henri raises a hand in a wave. “Louis, right?” He ashes idly between his feet. “Can I get a hand with my stuff?”

“I—” Louis begins, doing a mental head count of what staff are inside and which would be available to help. “I’ll check,” he settles on, but Henri doesn’t move to cross the drive, and neither does Louis; marooned as he is on the front steps by his lack of foresight to throw a pair of shoes on. His bare toes flex against the warm wood underfoot. “Would you like to come in out of the sun?” he asks, as the moment stretches, and breaks. Henri pulls a face, and shrugs.

“I don’t mind it,” he says, a clear dismissal, and Louis lingers a moment longer before darting back into the cool dimness of the house. He finds the housekeeper lingering in the kitchen, chatting up the cook, and before the man is even halfway to Henri’s car, Louis is back at the dining table with his breakfast and his coffee, his book in his hand but eyes firmly on the scene through the front windows. Henri, eyes crinkled with a smile as he shakes the housekeeper’s hand, and the way he leans in close to mutter something inaudible to him seems teasing, conspiratorial. Louis’ ears burn, and he ducks his forehead to his book for a second as a wave of irritation flows through him. He hears the slam of a car door, the soft noise of the boot opening; footsteps on gravel, and when he resurfaces it’s to find Henri turning away, still talking to the housekeeper as they haul a couple suitcases through the overgrown grass. Louis watches them until they’re out of sight, disappeared amongst the slight rolls and dips of the long garden.

It’s always been like this; this inability to connect. People see his house and his father and make assumptions for themselves before Louis even opens his mouth. The staff stick with each other, have their own hierarchy within themselves, and that leaves Louis to his parents; a position he resents almost as much as that automatic sorting of himself with them. Nothing in common but a shared distaste for the other, and a genetic predisposition towards addiction. Louis smokes a cigarette as he watches Henri shuttle the few cases he has with him from the car to the cottage, and then he’s locking the car and leaving it there; shabby and too gaudy next to Louis’ mother’s sleek black Corvette; never driven, just lightly covered in that fine dust that gets kicked up from the gravel. It’s a sad metaphor for all their lives. Louis hates that he can find something even so shallowly in common with her. 

The day passes. There’s little more to add. Louis drags himself out for bread around noon, when he knows the streets will be empty and he’ll be able to walk along undisturbed. He spots Henri on his way home; coming up the drive with the bread in the crook of his arm, glasses sliding down his nose from the sweat on his face. He doesn’t notice Louis — far too fixated on the rusty old string trimmer that the old groundskeeper had condemned long ago, and Louis takes advantage of his distraction, lingering in the shade of one of the huge dark cherry trees that line the driveway as he watches him. Crouched in the long grass, his sun-browned face all scrunched up against the high noon sun above them as he gently eases the machine apart. Fixing it, Louis realises. 

A cherry smears to nothing against the gravel under his foot as he shifts. He can smell the sharp tang of the rotting fruit; pungent and near-overwhelming in his nose. _He’ll never get it done_ , he thinks, eyes on the push and pull of muscle in Henri’s arms; true strength, nothing like Louis could ever dream of. All covered over in golden skin, a sheen of sweat he can’t tear his eyes from. Then Henri’s eyes raise and meet his own, and Louis startles, shaking himself from his reverie; one so strong that he hadn’t even realised that the baguette he has clutched so tight to his side has bent in the middle, flopped over and sad-looking draped over his arm. 

“You’re not very good at hiding, you know,” Henri calls, sitting back on his heels as he shades his eyes with one large, oil-blackened hand. He’s not smiling, but there’s an edge of something teasing to his voice which makes Louis wants to sink back into the trees and curl up in embarrassment. He can feel his face flushing, even as he steps from the shade of the cherry tree, away from the sticky fermented smell of their rotting fruits. 

He hefts the bread in his arms, the poor broken loaf. “I wasn’t hiding.”

The crickets whir away in the silence that follows. Then Henri’s eyes crinkle with the nonplussed smile that dawns on his face, and he asks, “So what were you doing?”

“Walking home.” Louis can’t look at him; every time he tries his eyes slide irrevocably to the sweaty front of his off-white tee, to the blonde hair he can see under Henri’s lifted arm, the armpits and sleeves of his shirt high and tight from how small it is on him. Uselessly, he gestures with the sad baguette. “Fetching bread for lunch.”

Henri’s hand drops from his eyes, and he turns back to the string trimmer baring its guts in the grass in front of him as though his interest in the conversation has been abandoned. Louis finds himself still studying his face, freely now that his attention is gone. That full mouth, light lashes, blonde stubble that hadn’t been there a week ago. “You don’t have someone to do that for you?” he asks, something sly in his question, in the way his eyes flick up for just a second, just long enough to catch Louis staring. The corner of his mouth lifts. 

“Yes,” Louis says, stupidly, the back of his neck hot with embarrassment. “But I like it. The walk.”

Henri’s attention has already returned to his task, and he just laughs. “Enjoying chores,” he says to himself, and shakes his head, a smile curling his mouth even as his hands dip back into the machinery in front of him. Louis lingers a second longer, and when it becomes clear that Henri isn’t going to look back up, he flees back into the shade of the house, embarrassment prickly under his clothes when he glances back and finds Henri watching him; a vague, sun-haloed figure crouched amongst the tall grass. He shifts, upsetting a rush of flying little insects in a golden stream around him, and Louis closes the door with a definitive creak behind him. 

It’s only later, after he’s brought his mother’s lunch up to her bedroom; after he’s laid in bed with his headphones plugged into his record player loud enough and for long enough that his head hurts, that he can’t hear all the thoughts crowding his brain, does he hear it. A tiny, tinny noise beyond the cushioned padding of his headphones, rising through the soft noise of the record spinning away to nothing — he’s feeling too lazy to sit up and pick the needle up from it. The record had finished a while ago. But the noise makes him sit up, makes him pull the headset off, and it takes him a moment to put a name to the noise, that familiar sound of French summertime. Noisy two-stroke engine, the rising and falling whir of the blades. Henri must have gotten the string trimmer fixed, he realises, and crosses to the window to look, moving the needle from the finished record as he goes. 

The early evening is dropping warm and blue beyond his open bedroom window, and Louis’ gaze jumps from his father’s car now pulled in alongside his mother’s, then to the distant peak of the cottage roof he can see beyond the rolling grounds. The vague blue shapes of mountains rise up beyond that, but Louis’ eyes don’t linger on the familiar views from the window, instead finding Henri and his triumphed-over strimmer wandering along the driveway, shaping up the borders where the grass is encroaching upon the gravel. Louis must have dozed off as his record had spun itself quiet, and it’s later than he’d anticipated; Henri is a dark blue wraith against the darkening grounds, the low, shifting light turning everything odd and two-dimensional. The trees whisper amongst themselves, a dreamy, drowsy susurration, and then Henri’s head lifts, and their eyes meet through the feet of cooling evening air between them. 

Louis feels zipped through with something golden yellow and electric, when Henri’s gaze settles on his own. Gone is that warm prickle of embarrassment from earlier, and he can almost see himself through Henri’s eyes as neither of them move to look away. It feels an odd game of chicken. Louis, silhouetted in his high attic window, his hair tangled from the sweat and dust of the day, from his impromptu nap. Henri, a dark violet smudge in the growing darkness; his strimmer at rest, now. Very deliberately, he folds his gloved hands over the handle of the thing, and settles his chin on them. 

Louis wishes he could see his face properly. He wonders if Henri wishes the same.

————-

Time passes with the monotony that Louis always associates with summers spent at his parents’ house. He’s been in university for the past three years — is looking at another year’s sentence to pursue his masters for lack of anything better to do — and the return to the sluggish, small town lifestyle of his childhood wears a little harder with each year that passes. Lazing around in the sun with a book loses it’s shine after the first week of it, and Louis tends to spend the remaining eight weeks itchy and hot and irritable, eyes already set ahead on a new semester unfolding for him in Paris. His friends live there, few that he has. His term-time home and all of his favourite books and the astounding privacy of it all. He never has to feel pink with embarrassment at seeing his mother’s maid doing his laundry; hanging out his underwear to flap in the wind for all the neighbourhood to see. Never has to sit on the receiving end of one of his father’s fits of vitriol, or watch his mother drink herself into her nightly stupor; never even has to _think_ or remember that his life contains such characters and such situations. 

It’s week two of ten. Louis has exhausted his record collection, has practically worn a hole into the sole of one of his favourite sneakers from wandering the village, and has read everything worth reading around the house. The only options left are to start walking in the vague direction of Paris and take his chances on the long, sunflower-bracketed roads that lead into civilisation, or to befriend the only new face for miles around; the only new face within thirty years of his age range. 

Both are difficult options. Both come with their own very specific set of pitfalls. Sometimes, Louis thinks he’d rather take his chances against the unrelenting sun and the cars thundering past him on his pilgrimage back to Paris than to take on the task of talking to Henri, who is proving more of an enigma than Louis had anticipated. Gone is the small flame of excitement that had been lit in him that day he’d met Henri, stood in the hallway to the drawing room with his shirt stuck sweaty to the small of his back, his hand swallowed easily by Henri’s own. He’s sure it’s his fault, he’s sure it began with forgetting to put on shoes, by delegating the task of helping Henri with all his suitcases to somebody else. It was no wonder he found himself separated so often — he’d climbed up on that wobbly pedestal all of his own accord. 

There’s nothing else to do this summer but fix it. So much in Louis’ life has fallen very neatly into his lap; his wealth, his education, so there’s something about Henri’s easy dismissal of him that irks him right in that place he supposes is under-exercised, too accustomed to getting things with little to no effort. 

It pours with rain for three days straight after Louis makes the decision to befriend Henri, forcing him inside to read and draw and watch the man tramp around in the rain dressed head to toe in waterproofs doing his dailies. It’s that summer rain; heavy and hot and unrelenting, and the humidity in the air makes his hair curl even more than usual, makes him feel sticky and damp and over-warm at all times. The house is all shut up during those three days; Louis’ father leaves for call outs, to gamble, for whatever else it is he does when he doesn’t want to be around his family. It’s stifling, being shut up inside with only his mother and the staff to break his monotony, and Louis and his father get into a row over lunch on the second day, the three of them sat around the long, dark wood table as cold meats and cheeses drift in and out. Louis watches his mother smear a pat of butter on a piece of bread, her glass topped up full and her plate near empty, and feels a quick dart of cooped up, overfamiliar irritation snake through him. He’s had to confront his mother’s drinking more over these three days than he has over the entire three weeks of summer he’s been at home. Then his father mutters something, and it’s hard not to retort.

“I graduated,” he says, voice thin, eyes on his plate. Talking back to his father is not a skill he’s very competent in. “There’s nothing more for me to be doing with myself.” 

Maurice snorts, eyes on his own plate too. This is how their confrontations generally go; even in rage, they’re disconnected. Sometimes Louis yearns for the closeness of a good old nose-to-nose screaming match, or at least the decency of eye contact. “If you think that your efforts end in graduation, you’re going to have a very difficult wake up call.” He reaches for the roquefort, past Celeste, who is looking at Louis with something reproachful in her eyes. He glances away from her.

“I’m going back to university soon,” he says, squaring his shoulders a little. “You’ll be rid of me then.”

“Not for long,” Maurice mutters, mouth full. “Don’t think I’ll keep paying for that place in Paris once you’re done.”

“You think I’ll move back here?”

A raise of an eyebrow. “You’ve never had to earn for yourself. Why would you start after wasting another year on a degree that guarantees you nothing but unemployment?” His lip curls. “Apartments in Paris aren’t paid for on a painter’s wage, you know, Louis.”

And on it goes. 

They both go around in circles with each other when they argue, the two of them like angry cats; Maurice snapping in disappointment and annoyance after a hard day at work, and Louis snapping right back. _It’s not my fault you could only bear to have one child_ , Louis wants to retort, but the words refuse to leave his chest. _And it’s not my fault that child was me._ A disappointment; introverted, artistic, him. Prone to sensitivity, to his mother’s skirts when he was young, to the privacy of his own room as he grew up. To diaries and sketchbooks and novels and poetry, to art school in Paris and not medical school like his father had hoped. And, well — every other unspoken and unacknowledged thing he knows his father is somehow aware of, even if Louis is only barely creeping towards knowing any of it himself. He remembers vividly the presents he would get for birthdays and Christmases as a child; toy cars and little stethoscopes; a football, a myriad of toy swords. Perhaps even more vividly, Louis remembers when those gifts had petered out. 

It’s only when Louis’ mother says, “Maurice, there’s no changing his mind,” that they quiet. The bland tone of her voice, the slight drag of a slur to it, irritates and upsets Louis more than his father’s words had, by far. The acceptance of the state of him. The quiet and measured reminder that Louis is always going to be nothing more than himself in his parents eyes; effeminate, bookish, doomed to an adulthood living under his parents roof regretting the time he spent doing the thing he loves, rather than the thing which is his duty. First son, only son; he knows without asking that not following in his father’s footsteps all the way along past plastic cars and plastic swords to the sweeping steps of medical school may very well be the same as spitting in his face. 

The chair scrapes loudly against the hardwood floor as he stands, his lunch picked over and abandoned, appetite gone. Only the cook meets his eye, stood silent and frozen in the doorway, a bowl of olives Maurice had asked for and promptly forgotten in favour of their argument clutched in her hand. Then her eyes slide away and Louis hangs his head. 

“Excuse me,” he mutters, and neither of his parents respond. 

His anger and helpless upset turn him out into the hallway, and without thinking he takes a hard right and goes for the front door over the stairs leading up to his bedroom. The need to get away from the house as a whole is an urgent, all-consuming feeling. 

The feeling leads him out onto the porch, and he stands there for a second; frozen, mind not made up. The world smells of warm rain and wet grass, the smell of rained-upon soil. It’s so pleasant, so nostalgic, that Louis steps out into it before he really processes the urge, mouth opening at the shock of coming out so suddenly into the downpour. It feels heavier than it had looked from the cover of the porch, and Louis’ glasses are useless in a matter of seconds; the world coming through in an odd, muted kaleidoscope of greys, greens, and browns from the raindrops obscuring his vision. _A walk_ , he thinks, rubbing the sleeve of his sweater uselessly across the lenses of his glasses, _a walk always makes things better._

He has no destination, no money, no cigarettes. The sound of the gravel underfoot is obscured by the rushing sound of the rain; relentless as it bounces back off the ground with the force of it, and Louis’ feet take him away from the gravel track that runs down to the front gates, away from the house and his parents and all their awful expectations. And Louis’ racing mind is quieted, now; as muffled as his footsteps. Everything feels quieter in the rain. He’s soaked to the skin in minutes, but he pays it little mind. 

The property is transformed by the rain. Maybe Louis is just so accustomed to it in summer that it feels different, like some strange other world a mirror image of the one he knows. Through the looking glass. It’s there in the lush, green dampness of the grass, the trees, all the bright flowers dulled and bent by the rain’s hand. His mother’s parasol and little garden furniture set paint an odd, empty picture through the sheets of rain; Louis walks in the opposite direction, heading towards the little walled garden that has grown wild and unkempt in their groundskeeper’s absence. The crumbling red brick walls are held up more by the thick ivy than by mortar, and it seems with every winter they only further degrade. Louis likes it; likes the _Secret Garden_ -esque mood to the place, as verdant and wild as it is. Untouched, save for the neat rows of carrots and potatoes, the cow parsley springing tall and sweet-smelling along the borders. In its looking glass twin of a world the garden is normally teeming with butterflies, with the high, rising noises of crickets and bees and every other ambassador of the insect world. Today, it’s quiet. Just Louis and the rain and the drooping heads of the cow parsley watching him pass by. 

And, of course —

Henri, his back to Louis, but unrecognisable in that expansive green rain slicker that had belonged to their previous groundskeeper. For a moment, Louis gets caught up in the oddness that the man had left his coat behind — was it his, or did Louis’ father technically own the thing; damp-smelling and huge? — but then he comes closer and Henri seems to sense him before Louis can even think of a way to announce himself.

They regard each other for a dragging, silent minute; only the loud rush of rain between them. Henri’s pale face peers out from his large hood, washed out and sallow by the dim afternoon light. “What are you doing?” he asks, finally, eyebrows raised practically to his hairline as he rakes his eyes over Louis. He can only imagine the figure he cuts; bedraggled and soaked as he is, his hair slicked flat to his skull, face bare without the glasses he’d irritably stuffed away in his trouser pocket.

He shrugs, and normally where he knows he’d be nervous to be standing and speaking to Henri so closely, looking so goddamned terrible, Louis finds he can’t muster the emotion. “Taking a walk,” he answers, like it’s the most normal thing in the world, like he’s not standing out in the torrential summer rain in a woollen sweater and thin pair of slacks. He knows he looks bizarre; can tell by the way Henri’s expression borders on a puzzled kind of amusement. “You?”

“My _job_ ,” he says, slowly, his voice so deep and measured that it’s almost lost to the pounding rain. He gestures, and Louis follows his hands; spotting a sodden spool of twine in one hand, secateurs in the other. “The wind’s had the crabapple tree over.”

Louis glances. “I didn’t even know that was still here.” It’s lopsided, leant drunkenly against the low brick wall its growing next to, and Louis can see where Henri had been attempting to lash it straight before he’d been interrupted. He can see white-green flesh where it’s torn and buckled under the press of the wind and rain, and feels an odd pulse of melancholy at the sight of it. “I used to pick the fruit off it when I was a kid, until I got a bellyache from it.” He remembers the taste well; crunchy and too-tart, drying his tongue and his teeth with their bitterness. 

When he looks back at Henri, the other man is frowning, and it dawns on him just how bizarre this particular encounter is. Even more bizarre than the other awkward meetings they’ve had. It’s a testament to how shitty his parents have made him feel that Louis barely feels the embarrassment that would normally be swamping him. The wind picks up, throwing the rain even harder at them, and it takes Louis hunching his shoulders and stuffing his cold, wet hands into his sodden pockets to unstick Henri, it seems. He makes a noise; somewhere between a grumble and an exasperated sigh, and tucks the secateurs back into the pockets of his huge coat. “C’mon,” he mutters, and jerks his head in the direction away from the garden. “There ain’t enough to you to be out in this.”

He’s not wrong; Louis has always been small, prone to illness. If this wander out into the rain doesn’t stick him with a week-long summer cold, he’ll be shocked.

“Have you ever seen the inside?” Henri asks, as they walk, heads bowed against the rain, the long grass wetting Louis’ legs even more. There used to be a track down to the old cottage, he remembers it; bare feet on the hot, irregular flagstones that paved the way through the garden. He wonders if it’s still there, somewhere beneath all this overgrown grass which seems to be Henri’s lowest priority at the moment. “Of the cottage, I mean.”

“Sure,” Louis says, words near whipped away by the wind. He wonders if his parents can see him, disappearing over the undulation of the garden with the new groundskeeper. He wonders if they’re even looking. “When I was little.”

“Haven’t been in since?” Henri asks, but Louis is spared answering as the cottage comes into view, and sends Henri diving through his numerous pockets for the keys. Louis is glad for his distraction, not wanting to have to dive into the last handful of years with a man he’s shared no more than a few words with since they’ve met, and watches as he comes up with a huge bundle of keys that he begins flicking through. “Sorry,” he says, the two of them now squeezed underneath the narrow trellis that covers the doorway and lines the cottage. The groundskeeper from Louis’ childhood had trained a grapevine to grow along it, and Louis hasn’t seen it in so long that he can’t help but tip his head back to look at it, marvelling at how dense and lush it is compared to the unsure, young plant of his memories. “Nice, isn’t it?” Henri asks, eyes on Louis for a moment before he turns to slide the key home into the lock. He jiggles it; the lock old and sticky and needing a little persuasion, then all it takes is the toe of his boot braced to the bottom and it opens. 

“It’s cosy,” Louis murmurs, as he follows Henri over the threshold, eyes wandering around the room as he lingers there. Henri snorts.

“I know what that means,” he says, stepping close to Louis to hang his coat on the back of the door, leaving it to drip puddles onto the warped wooden boards beneath their feet. “’S’not much but it’s all I need.”

“No,” Louis insists, eyes alighting on the little cast iron wood stove sat squatly to his left, to the well worn furniture and the warm, yellow glow of the light on the wooden floors, on the wooden walls. It’s overwhelming, almost, to be so suddenly wrapped up in Henri’s life like this. “I mean it. It’s nice in here.” An ashtray sits neat and emptied on the rough-hewn little table that neighbours a huge, slouching armchair that must be a favourite, judging by its closeness to the stove. It’s dizzying, another world compared to the cool, dim interior of his parents house; silent and dusty and static. 

“Haven’t finished unpacking just yet,” Henri says, pulling his wet boots off and leaving them scattered by the door. Louis follows suit, lining them up against the wall underneath Henri’s dripping coat. He wishes he could so easily shed his wet clothes, as his sweater is beginning to stick to him, the wool itchy as it settles damply against his skin — Henri’s thick, dry sweater under his coat is envy inducing, he looks so warm. Even in the close, cosy interior of the cottage, Louis can feel himself starting to shiver.

As if sensing his steadily growing discomfort, Henri passes him a t-shirt, which Louis takes on reflex; fingers closing on the soft, buttery fabric, well-worn and obviously well-loved. At the blank expression on his face, Henri’s mouth quirks, amused. “I assume you know how to dress yourself.” 

“What?”

His smile widens; that teasing one, wickedly amused. Louis is still waiting to be let into that joke that always seems to be dancing in his eyes. “Put the dry clothes on,” he says, slow, like Louis is an idiot. “Take the wet ones off.”

The back of his neck prickles with the blush that follows Henri’s words. “You didn’t give me trousers,” he stutters out, hands making fists in the soft tee in his hands. Henri rolls his eyes, that smile still tugging at his mouth.

“I doubt I’d find a pair to fit you,” he says, and his eyes rake over Louis so quickly that he almost flinches, suddenly self conscious. Then he changes tack, so smoothly it’s easy to pretend he hadn’t just taken Louis in from his toes to his rapidly drying hair, “You hungry?”

“No,” Louis murmurs, thinking of his untouched lunch, his appetite long lost. His hands twist in the borrowed t-shirt, held close enough to his belly that it’s making a damp spot in the light grey fabric. “I ate,” he adds, drifting from the door as he tugs his jumper over his head; quickly, furtively. 

There’s a beat of silence, and then Henri pulls his sodden socks from his feet and announces, “Well, I’m starving.”

The socks and Louis’ jumper find a home on the top of the wood stove, which Henri takes great care in lighting before gesturing for Louis to take a seat at the little scrubbed wood table. He sits, sliding into the creaky old dining chair to watch Henri make himself a sloppy sandwich, his little kitchenette neat as a pin but well worn, visibly old. Louis wonders if he’d cleaned it when he arrived; the cottage smells like the wood fire, like rain through the open window, like some musky, peppery aftershave that Louis decides is too intimate to linger on. 

Henri slides him a cup of coffee, black and rich and somehow exactly what Louis needs. He takes a sip and closes his eyes, forgetting for a second the tension that has his shoulders up around his ears, and then he opens his eyes to find Henri watching him, something calculating and considering in his expression, before it smooths out and he turns to settle the percolator back on the stove.

“Warming up?” he asks, and Louis shrugs a shoulder, eyes on his coffee as his curls his hands around the mug. He can feel Henri’s eyes on him. “I won’t ask why you were out there.”

Louis snorts, and finally finds the courage to meet Henri’s gaze. “I told you.”

“I weren’t asking,” Henri says, settling his chin on his knuckles as his eyes move over Louis’ face. He feels caught by the attention, all pinned up like a little bug on display, but finds he can’t break eye contact; it feels too much like backing down, and he’s had just enough of that for one day. 

“Well, good,” he says, and drinks his coffee. Henri’s eyes curve in a smile, his mouth hidden behind his hand, and Louis can’t suppress the little thrill he gets when Henri is the first to break eye contact. _I won_ , he thinks, privately, lingering for just a moment too long on Henri’s sun tan, the boyish freckles on his skin. His pale eyelashes and paler beard look near white against it, and Louis wonders internally if he ever spends very much time indoors. Every time he spots him Henri is doing _something_ ; elbows deep in his mother’s overgrown borders, or tackling the gargantuan task of mowing all the overgrown grass that’s shot up since their last groundskeeper gave it all up. It should barely be a surprise that he’d found him outside earlier, even if running into him had felt vaguely fateful. 

The cottage reflects this apparent commitment to his new role, too. The few unpacked boxes that are stacked up at the base of his large, wooden-framed bed besides, the place has the distinct air of a place not truly lived in. The neat kitchen, the uncovered wood floor underfoot, the lack of clutter, of real personality. Even the tabletops are bare, save for that clean ashtray and a lamp sat on the bedside table, casting the handful of spare change and the lone paperback underneath it into a halo of light. It’s been a week, give or take, since Louis had made a fool of himself out on the front steps of the house. Two weeks since Henri had unfolded himself from that low sofa and shook Louis’ hand, had lit that spark of excited interest in him that had dulled in the embarrassment that followed. Louis takes another sip of coffee, eyes on the hypnotic flicker of the fire through the soot-stained glass door of the wood stove. Opposite him, Henri slowly rolls himself a cigarette.

“You enjoying the job?” Louis asks, unable to tear his eyes from the lick of flame within the stove. A log shifts, barely audible over the drumming of the rain on the roof over their heads. Henri hums, and Louis glances back in time to see the corner of his mouth curl in a smile.

“Too early to tell,” he says, and his expression is reserved when he settles his eyes back on Louis. “What, your dad been asking?”

Louis shakes his head. “No, I’m just curious. It seems like you don’t ever take a day off.”

Henri wets the paper with his tongue, fingers smoothing out along the cigarette before he pops it in his mouth, hands going to his pockets for a lighter. That half-smile is still there, just as amused as very slightly mocking. “Well it ain’t exactly brain surgery,” he mutters around his smoke. “Pass the ashtray.”

Louis passes it, and the movement of leaning over the back of the chair to snag it from the side table brings with it a waft of that peppery scent he’s already beginning to associate with Henri. After a beat, he realises it must be from the t-shirt; washed soft and overlarge on his small frame. “But you like it?” he asks, just to distract from the blush he can feel beginning to spread over the nape of his neck. 

The chair creaks as Henri leans back, puffing on his cigarette to keep it lit. “I do,” he says, plucking his smoke from his mouth before settling his hands over his stomach. The deep green colour of his sweater is handsome against the coppery colour of his tan. “Gives me time to think about stuff.” He gestures, smoke falling on his clothes. “Clears the mind, plus I’m not too good at anything else.” The smirk that follows belies his words. Louis thinks back to the sure, quick way he had fixed that condemned string trimmer, and wonders if Henri is aware of just how useless Louis is by comparison. 

“Well that’s why I was walking,” he pipes up, mind turning inevitably from his own uselessness to his father’s words over lunch. God, what Maurice wouldn’t give for a son like Henri; physical, masculine, handy around the house. He waves his hand, self conscious with Henri’s blue eyed gaze on him. “Clearing my mind.”

“In the rain?” Henri laughs. “You really needed it, huh? Couldn’t just go for a drive?”

There’s a beat of silence that follows, in which Henri’s grin grows. Finally, Louis breaks it, head hung low as he admits, “I can’t drive,” at the exact moment in which Henri announces, “Oh my god, you can’t drive.”

They laugh, Louis’ hand over his face as he screws his eyes shut, grinning despite the teasing, disbelieving edge to Henri’s voice. For a moment his conversation with his parents is forgotten; all he knows is Henri’s delighted laughter, the unfamiliar lightness in his chest. Coffee on his tongue, Henri’s scent in his nose, all around him.

“You have a car!” Henri cries, disbelief thick in his voice. “A nice car!”

That makes Louis sober slightly. His grin drops a little, and he curls his hand nervously around his mug, thumb worrying at a small, smooth chip in the lip of it. “It’s my mother’s car.” He hates drawing attention to her in front of people who _know_.

Henri makes a wounded noise. “That car belongs to her? She can’t even —” He doesn’t need to finish his sentence, and thankfully cuts himself off there as he seems to realise what he was about to say. Louis drops his eyes to the tabletop, the sudden quiet compounding his sudden shame. For a long time, neither of them say a word. It’s just the soft sound of the crackling fire and the incessant drum of the rain on the roof, and then Henri clears his throat and leans forward, contrition in every line of his face.

“You know,” Henri says, tone apologetic. “I could teach you.”

Louis can’t make eye contact with him. “It’s okay, I know she —” He grimaces at the table. “I mean, you don’t have to do that. You’re busy.”

“I want to,” he says, almost immediately, and Louis forces himself to meet his gaze just to check, to see if his eyes belie his words. “Listen, a guy can’t go around not knowing how to drive.” He grins, then; that disarmingly handsome smile. “You got anything better to do?”

Louis decides not to let sting the fact that Henri has noticed his idleness this summer. He shrugs, and looks away, eyes seeking out the wet, grey world beyond the big old window set in the wall beside Henri’s bed. To think that there’s anything more in the world than this; this cottage, this man, this conversation, is absurd. But the rain lies beyond the weathered front door, and his home and his parents beyond that, and the thought shakes Louis free from his self consciousness, and has him nodding before he’s even turned the offer itself over in his mind. 

“Fine,” he says, and Henri’s expression wobbles slightly; edging close to something playful, and Louis finds himself secretly delighted to cut him off before he can tease him, pleased by his new apparent knowledge of the man. “Okay, more than fine!” Henri reigns his expression in, head tipping to the side — fondly, Louis wants to say. “I’d really appreciate it.”

“Good.” He grinds out the butt of his cigarette in the ashtray by his hand, and then drains his coffee with such an air of finality that Louis feels compelled to do the same. “We’ll start tomorrow, once I’ve gotten the weeding done. Feeling dry yet?”

He isn’t, but it doesn’t feel like the right answer so he just nods, mind going to the thought of attempting to wrestle his wet socks back into his wet shoes. Henri nods too, a smile on his lips as he pushes the chair back from the table and stands; and he seems bigger in the cottage now, with Louis sat down and looking up at him — solid and tall and larger than life. Louis can’t quite believe that someone like Henri would voluntarily offer to spend time with someone like him, and finds himself saying, “If you’re too busy, it really doesn’t matter,” before he can stop himself. Just to cover up his own awkwardness, he stands too, the uneven floorboards creaking under his weight.

The look Henri levels him with is steady, faintly puzzled, like he can’t work out why Louis is heading back around to the topic. “I _am_ busy,” he says, and reaches across for Louis’ emptied cup, his own dangling from his fingers. “But when I’m not, we’ll drive.” The dishes find their way into the sink, and Henri runs the tap over them for a moment before he shuts it off, and turns to Louis with an open, questioning look on his face. “Still in?”

Louis opens his mouth, and then closes it. There’s not much he can argue with, not with Henri standing with his hands in his pockets, that easy smile on his face. “Okay,” he says, and backs towards the door, towards his wet shoes and everything waiting for him on the other side of all that rain. “Henri, thank you.” He hopes the man can grasp it’s for more than the promise of driving lessons, for more than a cup of coffee and half an hour out of the rain. 

He just shrugs; Louis’ gratefulness effortlessly and silently taken in, and in that moment Louis knows that there’s something else to the man. Something so unabashedly confident and self assured that it only makes Louis want to wilt further. “Tomorrow,” he says, a gentle and invisible push towards the door, and when Louis steps outside he finds the rain has gotten lighter; a fine mist instead of the hammering downpour that it had been earlier. The air feels charged, like something has shifted, changed, and it’s only when Louis is back in his bedroom and stripping out of his wet clothes does he realise he’d walked away in Henri’s t-shirt, and that Henri had let him. 

————

Louis wakes late the next day; languishing dreamily in bed for a while, soaking in the scattered sunlight thrown by his blinds, which rattle slightly in the soft breeze that stirs them. It reaches Louis, half awake and barely there, smelling of cut grass and just barely stirring his hair as he presses his face into the pillow to escape the light. His mind is a muddled, fuzzy slipstream of thought, images, half snatches of song and conversation. _Tomorrow_ , he thinks, some odd, niggling thought in the back of his mind — _what was meant to happen tomorrow?_. And then comes the high whine of the cicadas, rising and falling against the backdrop of the old diesel mower, and Louis jerks up in bed as though electrocuted. 

Tomorrow. Henri’s promise, set against the drumming noise of the rain on the cottage roof; black coffee, a crackling fire, wet socks steaming over the hot metal of the stove. Louis had fallen asleep in Henri’s t-shirt, and now he plucks at the front of it, the fabric clinging to him with the light sweat that sleep had worked up on him. Half of him is embarrassed, but the other half wants to sink back down into his duvet and curl up with the smell that seems to be wrapped deep into the very fibres of the thing, thin and moth-eaten in places, the collar fraying with how well worn it is. Aftershave, cigarettes, that warm human smell that Louis always associates with the crook of the elbow, the nape of the neck, the slice of skin behind the ear. 

_Do you —_ his mind begins, and then, _no, it’s not like that._ That lifelong internal conversation. _Just wanna be near. That’s all._

He thinks of Henri’s smile, his small, neat home, that blue-eyed, unselfconscious charm he seems to exude from every pore. Louis wants to be close to him; he can feel this odd, tugging need to be around the man. Summers tend to be a lonely period of time for him, and it means that now he’s faced with a man his own age, he wants so much to be _liked_ that it feels near obsessive. The thought breaks him from his languid morning in bed; sends him into the shower, down for breakfast, all the while thinking of how best to approach Henri, to prompt him to remember his promise. 

The sound of the mower is the backdrop to the majority of his morning, save for stretches of silence in which he imagines Henri sitting and taking a break, drinking a glass of water or pulling his sweaty t-shirt over his head. The rain is long gone; the day is so sunny and hot that it’s like the rain had never happened, the flagstones outside the front door steaming in the heat as they dry. Louis watches this all from the window seat in the library, settled back in the faint breeze through the swung-open window, his book propped open against his knee and shirt unbuttoned to his navel. It’s noon. A bowl of grapes sits on the cushion by his leg; a cigarette burns itself to nothing between his fingers. Louis is distracted, and distraction feels like such a regular state of being these days that he barely realises, not until he begins to feel the heat of his cigarette as it burns low to his knuckles, and he curses under his breath as he stubs it out in the ashtray nearby, wondering where the morning has gone. He’d risen late, had a slow breakfast, and seems to have been distracted ever since. It’s the irregular glimpses of Henri he’s been treated to for the past hour or so, the very same glimpses that had him sitting himself in the window of the library. Henri, bronzed and glowing with sweat under the high noon sun above them, pushing that old mower around like getting the grass cut is his do or die task for the day.

“Jesus,” Louis mutters to himself, and forces his attention back to the book in front of him. The words muddle together, and he manages a page and a half before he’s finding himself irrevocably drawn back to the view beyond the window frame. 

Henri is closer than he had been; Louis can smell the smoke from the cigarette dangling between his lips. Quickly, covertly, Louis’ eyes dart across his bare chest, following the sweep of tattoos that sprawl beneath the sheen of sweat on his torso, and he swallows, mind drifting —

 _Does tattooed skin taste different?_

The thought is gone before Louis can even comprehend where it had come from, but his shock at the sudden appearance of it is physical; he jumps as though scalded, book slipping closed as he sits himself up straight, tearing his eyes from the wingspan of the butterfly that is taunting him from its place between Henri’s nipples. His ears burn, and his eyes flit to the darkened, empty doorway of the library, needling into the spaces between bookshelves, as if to be watched is to see the thought that had slipped so quickly through his mind. He feels like it’s a neon sign above his brow, blinking blood red letters as he swings his attention back to the garden, taking in Henri’s tattooed back, the push and pull of his muscles under all that golden skin, before he breaks from it entirely. 

His mother is in the hallway when he bursts out of the library, a robe belted around her waist, her eyes puffy and bloodshot in the clear light of day. Louis stops as though guilty, book clutched to his chest as they silently take each other in. He can tell she’s come from the porch; there are pine needles clinging to the gauzy hem of her robe. 

“Louis,” she says, and then her eyes flick to the garden beyond the open front doors, drawn by some movement that’s enough to make her change tack. He can see it; the shifting of her gears. “My god, have you ever seen so many tattoos?”

Louis doesn’t have to look to know she’s spotted Henri, oblivious to the chaos he’s causing in the house. “I don’t know,” he says quickly; too quick. His mother’s eyes narrow. The noise of the mower cuts out, and in the ringing silence that follows Louis offers a weak, “I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything.” It feels like a fitting, catch-all response, and silently repeats it to himself as he follows his mother through to the porch, catching Henri’s eye as he goes. The man lifts a hand in greeting, and it’s all Louis can do to school his expression into something detached as he does the same. He can feel Celeste’s eyes on him; needles in the side of his skull. A mother always knows her son, right? The thought frightens him, somewhere deep down and dark that doesn’t often see the light of day. 

The porch smells like pine needles, like warm wood, like Pastis. “Are you hungry?” Celeste asks, and Louis’ follows the path of her hand to half a loaf of bread, some butter, a bowl of shiny black olives. He swallows.

“Not really.”

“Cigarette?” Her tone is listless, eyes now hidden behind a pair of sunglasses as she offers him her pack. He hesitates, and then nods. “Thank you,” she says for him, like he’s a little kid, and he echoes it back quietly, ducking his head to light it. With his eyes on the cigarette he doesn’t see her focus shift this time, so a reply is already on his lips when she asks, “Would you like something to eat?” He glances up, brow furrowed, and then snaps his jaw closed as he sees who she’s actually addressing. 

Henri, elbows braced to the porch railing, that warm smile on his face and all those tattoos there for the world to see. Louis takes an absurd, involuntary step back, eyes jumping from that butterfly to the white tee thrown over his shoulder, to the sweat shiny hollow of his throat. “I can’t ever turn down an offer of food,” he says, and Louis has to look away as his smile widens, that easy charm rolling off him in waves. Distantly, he registers his mother’s laugh, and wonders if she feels so wary of those tattoos anymore. 

“Come sit,”she says, and Henri doesn’t move. His smile grows.

“I’m all dirty, ma’am.” He settles his chin on his arm, hooked over the railing, and glances at Louis. “I’ll stand.”

Louis, ever so slightly, inclines his head in greeting. Henri’s eyelids drop a little, and then he turns back to Celeste, to the chunk of buttered bread she’s handing him. Louis feels breathless, thrumming like a live wire with something he doesn’t dare name; he takes a seat at the rickety little folding table his mother drags onto the porch on hot days, reaches for an olive on reflex, just for something to do with his hands, his mouth. It’s a sharp little burst of saltiness on his tongue, and Louis thinks of skin, of sweat, shining slick. 

“How’s the work?” his mother is asking, and Louis finds he can barely tune into their conversation, mind still playing on a loop that shocking little thought that had slipped through him. He daren’t even think the words, not with his mother right there, not with Henri and all that golden skin, all those sun-beaten, worn in tattoos. He’d never noticed them before. How had he never noticed them before?

“’S good for the garden, though,” Henri is saying, the bread a lump in his cheek as he talks through his mouthful. He shrugs, and glances over his shoulder, gestures to something which Louis has tuned back into the conversation too late to glean. “Mower needs some more diesel, I’ll head out later when everything’s open again.”

Celeste’s expression is inscrutable behind her sunglasses. Louis doesn’t know how Henri can be so at ease in her presence; he watches as the man finishes his food, and wipes his hands on his jeans, taking a step back from the porch as he does so. The movement takes him out of the shade of the house, drenches him in sunlight once more, and Louis swallows against the feeling the sight gives rise to in him. 

“What d’you think?” Henri asks, and for a moment all parties are silent, and then he turns that blue eyed gaze on Louis, who starts, feeling his ears go hot at being caught staring. Henri’s grin is so sly that Louis can almost believe that he was able to tune into every thought racing between his ears, and almost wants to cover his face just to lose the scrutiny of those eyes. “Wanna drive me?”

Louis senses Celeste’s surprise; he can feel the needles of her gaze once more. He clears his throat, hands twisting in his lap as he does his very best not to look at her. “That might be a little advanced for me,” he murmurs, and doesn’t miss Henri’s eyes dropping to his chest, and then back to his face. Self consciously, he passes a hand over his front, wondering if he’d dropped cigarette ash on himself.

“Have more faith in yourself,” Henri says, that smile still playing around his mouth. His hand goes to the shirt he has slung over his shoulder, an absent touch with Louis forces himself not to follow. He doesn’t need to see the way it exposes the white underbelly of Henri’s bicep, the dark blonde hair of his armpit and the woman’s face tattooed pretty and coquettish there; he already knows. “I’ll be goin’ at two sharp, get your drivin’ shoes on.”

He leaves with no fanfare; a wave to Celeste, who doesn’t react, and then not a minute later the noise of the mower starts up again, and Louis is left to his mother’s company. They’re both silent for a long moment, and then she reaches for the Pastis and Louis closes his eyes. 

“I didn’t know you two were friends.” 

He passes his hand over his face, wipes at the sweat beading his forehead. “We’re not.” 

“But he’s offering for you to drive his car,” she says, quietly. The smell of anise is heavy in the air; Louis can hear the glug of a bottle, then the noise of it being set down.

“I told him I can’t drive, he thought it was ridiculous.” _Which it is_ , he wants to say, but can’t find the words. When he opens his eyes, Celeste is looking at him — really looking at him — and it startles Louis into silence; any words he was half-conjuring die on his lips. 

She takes a moment to light a cigarette, the same as the one burning down between Louis’ fingers, and then tosses her hair over her shoulder as she settles back into her chair. If Louis didn’t know she was three sheets to the wind and has been for days, he’d think it was a pretty imposing sight. Fortunately, he knows. Unfortunately, she still scares him. “Well maybe it’d be nice,” she says, an edge to her voice that keeps him silent, keeps him waiting for what’s to come next. And sure enough, “Maybe you’d be able to do something with yourself, for a change.”

“I don’t think being able to drive a car will make me any less useless to you,” Louis finds himself biting out, and has to force himself to not slap a hand over his mouth as he realises he’d said the thought out loud. For a long moment the only sound is the noise of Henri’s mower, and then Celeste _laughs_ , and Louis’ stomach knots up tighter with nerves.

“But life is all about attempts, Louis.” She reaches for her glass, and all Louis can smell is the drink, that cloying liquorice stink. “What’s the harm in another one?”

————

“You were wearing my shirt,” is the first thing he says, and then, “What was with the no show?”

When Louis looks up from his sketchbook, Henri is blocking out the sun; his hair a cropped blonde halo around his head. His stomach swoops, a complicated little pirouette of nerves and bashfulness at having Henri’s attention focused in on him like this. Blue eyes, blonde lashes; the scruff of his beard is gone, and Louis can’t decide whether he likes it more or less. “You didn’t look like you were missing it,” he says, pencil hovering above the page, an odd surge of bravery coming over him. It’s worth it for the grin he gets in return. 

“I noticed you noticing.”

 _Are we…_ Louis thinks, and then dismisses it. _He wouldn’t be._

It’s been three days since Louis and his mother had spoken on the porch; since Henri had invited him driving; since he and Henri had last seen each other. To say that Louis had been lying low was only a half-truth. 

“I’ve never been stood up before,” Henri says, and braces his elbow against the frame of the library window. It brings him closer to Louis, close enough to smell his sweat. “How does it feel bein’ the first?”

Louis shrugs, and turns his eyes back to his sketchbook, propped against his knees. “It had to happen some time.” He’s sat in the window of the library again; his hopeful little perch. It’s taken three days for Henri to come speak to him; three days of watching him move around the property and pretend that he can’t see Louis in the window.

“You wound me,” Henri says, sounding anything but. When Louis looks again, he’s smiling, a hand pressed to the centre of his chest. At Louis’ glance his grin widens. “Were you too scared?”

“Sure.” It’s easier than to try and explain the truth. And Louis knows it’d grind conversation to a halt, make things awkward and stilted, and he’s enjoying this easy exchange between them more than he’d like to admit. “Didn’t I say it sounded a little advanced?”

Henri inclines his head. “You did.” His hand moves from his chest, pulling his pouch of tobacco from his back pocket as he adds, “So what’s more your speed? I’m determined to get you behind the wheel.”

 _Why?_ Louis wants to ask, watching as Henri first rolls his cigarette, smacks his lighter once against his palm, and then ducks his head until the end of his cigarette meets the flame. He can’t make sense of why the man suddenly wants to do this for him so badly; not a week ago they were barely on speaking terms, Louis having firmly alienated himself. “Maybe just working on starting the car,” he says, instead of the question that’s on his lips. Henri laughs at that, a low chuckle as smoke streams from his nostrils.

“Okay,” he says, easy. “So you’re a real beginner.”

“Hand on heart,” Louis replies, accepting a belated cigarette from Henri. “I’ve barely even sat behind the wheel before.”

Henri lights his cigarette, and then says, “Okay, so let’s go now.”

Louis laughs, and when Henri doesn’t join in, he stops; unsure. “Really?” he asks, and Henri shrugs, eyes squinted as he glances over his shoulder, out across the grounds. Louis’ stomach twists a little; burgeoning nerves. 

“I haven’t got anythin’ better to do.” He tips his head to the side, expression vaguely calculating as he looks Louis over, who does his best not to shrink under the scrutiny. “Waitin’ on some cement to dry.”

He almost says no. He really does; it’s right there hovering on the precipice of speech, tangled up in his voice box ready to be spoken, ready to ruin the comfortable atmosphere between them. And it’d ruin it for good; Louis doesn’t know Henri but he knows well enough his type, and his type is not one to be told no twice. Worse; to be stood up and then told no. And maybe it’s that knowledge, maybe it’s knowing this is his second chance, that has him nodding, already closing up his sketchbook and setting it aside as Henri grins. “Fine,” he says, and pushes his glasses up his forehead so he can rub at his eyes, “Fine, but if I crash your car don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“My car is _invincible_ ,” Henri says, leaning closer now, hand braced to the window frame as he drops his voice conspiratorially. “There’s nothin’ you can do to it that I haven’t already done.”

Louis believes it, and says as much; making Henri tip his head back and laugh as he steps back, far enough to give Louis room to jump down from his perch in the window. He leaves the sketchbook behind, takes only himself and the cigarette that Henri had given him; a different brand to the one he smokes, and faintly aromatic. Piece by piece, Louis feels like he’s building some approximation of the man up in his head. That scent of his home; musky cologne and this sweet cigarette smoke. He takes a long drag from it, and then fumbles the keys which Henri throws at him with no warning, pulled from the back pocket of his jeans where his work gloves usually hang. 

“You really are a beginner, huh?” Henri quips, watching Louis bend to retrieve them from the gravel. There’s something playful in his eyes when Louis straightens back up, and any smart comeback he’d been half-planning dies on his lips; a frustrating and consistent theme to their morning together so far. Henri’s beyond handsome; backlit by the low morning sun, with all those comfortable old tattoos showing themselves from the rolled up sleeves of his white t-shirt. Louis knows it’d be soft to touch; he can feel the phantom softness of the buttery old cotton shirt Henri had loaned him. 

“C’mon,” Henri adds, when the moment stretches too far, and Louis runs an embarrassed hand through his hair as he follows, turning the bunch of keys over in his hands as he goes.

Estate key. Cottage key. Car key. An old leather fob keyring with the medallion missing, and a dozen tiny keys that Louis knows must have homes all throughout the house and grounds. A flimsy plastic E.Leclerc tag looks far out of place amongst it all; Louis scratches at the face of it with his thumbnail, wondering if Henri had bought it, or found it, whether he had some kind of attachment to it or whether it was just there; forgotten. 

“Do you really trust me to drive your car?” he finds himself asking, as he gets into Henri’s low, boxy little Fiat. He braces his hands on the steering wheel, flexes them over the leather in a burst of anxiety before he forces himself to put the keys into the ignition, and to turn them. “I mean, d’you always ask people you don’t know to take it out?” The car engine is rumbling underneath them, a noisy, rough purr. 

Henri gets into the passenger seat with a grunt, closing the door hard behind him before his hands go straight for the driver’s side sun visor. He flips it down, and Louis hands him the pair of sunglasses that fall from it into his lap. “I know you well enough,” he says, leaving Louis to flip the sun visor back up, a grin on his face as he slips the sunglasses on; little round black lenses that obscure his expression as he adds, “And don’t forget, I know where you live.”

“Same to you,” Louis mutters, thinking of that distant peak of a cottage roof he can see from his attic window. He’d been watching it last night, sat idle at his desk with his sketchbook bare in front of him; realising that if he rose himself up in his chair by just a little, he could see the distant yellow glow of light through a window. It had felt vaguely voyeuristic, though not enough to stop. The light had gone off around eleven, and Louis had stayed up long after, alone with his thoughts and the cool fresh smell of the night through the open window. 

“Clutch,” Henri says, ignoring him. He taps his finger to the gearstick between them. “First gear, let’s go.”

The car is small; when Louis goes to shift the car into first as instructed, his knuckles skate along the outside of Henri’s thigh, and he jumps, pulls his hand back as though burned. “Sorry,” he mutters, ears hot as his hand hovers awkwardly in the empty space between them. 

Henri doesn’t move an inch, just patiently repeats, “First gear, Louis.” When Louis glances to the side, he finds Henri looking at him, something quietly thoughtful in his expression. 

He swallows. Shifts into first, holding his hand in such a way that he doesn’t touch Henri, who still hasn’t moved. He knows he’s blushing, and his face only gets hotter when he takes his foot off the clutch and the car stalls, jolting underneath them both as Henri laughs. 

“You really weren’t kidding,” he says, more to himself than to Louis, who ducks his head as he restarts the car. The dash lights back up, and then Henri’s hand nudges at his own, still white-knuckled around the head of the gearstick. “C’mon, I’ll do the gears, you just worry about driving.”

Louis can’t find it in himself to reply; he silently relinquishes his grip on the gearstick, and watches as Henri’s hand settles over the prints his embarrassed-hot fingers had made in the old leather. Something unspeakable, something forcibly-nameless is rising rapidly in his chest.

They drive for around an hour, loops of the village until Louis feels brave enough to take back control of the gears, and they drive fast down the flat, straight roads that lead out into even deeper countryside — fast for Louis, at least. Henri’s hand is gripped tight in the handle above the passenger window every time Louis risks a glance his way, eyes hidden behind his sunglasses but a smile on his mouth as the wind from the cracked window whips his hair into disarray. Louis’ heart swells huge in his chest, and he turns his eyes back to the endless ribbon of road before them before it swells too big to ever shrink back. 

Distantly, Louis realises he’s happy. The realisation comes as a slow shock, and his first instinct is to shy away; to think of all the things that could go wrong, that _are_ wrong. His clumsy gear changes, the grind of the car’s engine as he messes up the peddles, Henri’s instructions as he fucks up. His voice is steady, patient, but it makes it no less embarrassing. But the rumble of the tarmac under the tires brings with it a certain feeling of freedom that’s hard to shake; one that has him grinning, eyes squinted against the sun as it moves higher in the sky, his curls wild with the wind blowing through the hot interior of the car. According to Henri the A/C has never worked, so they make do and Louis can’t complain. He likes the feel of the wind in his face, the smell of the fields as they drive by; lavender followed by corn followed by the curious faces of sunflowers, all bent and staring up at the sun above. 

“Who taught _you_ how to drive?” he asks, raising his voice over the sound of the road, over the sound of the wind shuddering through the windows. Henri’s elbow is braced to the shoulder of the driver’s seat; his closeness making Louis feel bold, conspiratorial. Like they’re both in on some great excitement rather than Louis’ first, shaky driving lesson. 

“My dad,” Henri replies, and Louis risks a glance over to him in an attempt to read his expression, though he finds little there beyond his sunglasses. He wonders if Henri can relate to him, can relate to having a father like his, and is struck by how badly he hopes he could. How terrible can he be, to wish for something like that?

“Was he as good a teacher as you?” he asks, to break from the want in his mind, though belatedly he realises he might only be steering the conversation even deeper into that kind of territory. But then Henri laughs, and Louis feels him squeeze the top of the headrest, and that warm, private close feeling eclipses everything else. Just them, the road, the watchful faces of all those fields of sunflowers. 

“You think I’m a good teacher?”

Louis doesn’t break eye contact from the road, though he can feel Henri looking at him, so different from the icy darts of his mother’s attention. “Well, we’re both still alive.” 

Henri snorts, and then moves from Louis’ space. For a moment he bemoans the loss, but then hears the distinctive sound of Henri’s tobacco, and it’s only when it’s rolled, and then lit, does he respond. “We’ll see what you’re sayin’ when I get you to turn around in a minute.” 

“So soon?” Louis asks, and then catches sight of the time on the dashboard, and feels himself flush. “God, I didn’t notice the time.” He sounds so pathetic, so desperate for company even to his own ears, that it’s no surprise that Henri nudges at him, mouth pulled apologetic when Louis glances at him.

“Hey, we can go again,” he says, and the car is full of the smell of his cigarette, of the smell of _him_ , and the heat inside it is only making it stronger. The cottage times one thousand. Dimly, Louis thinks, _this car is the only place that isn’t my father’s_ , and quells the thought before any more can follow it. “If your parents fire me you won’t get the benefit of my superior teaching, after all.” And he grins, and Louis can’t help but mirror him.

“You drive a hard bargain,” he says, and they turn for home.

After that lesson, Henri goes back to his now-dry cement and Louis goes back to his seat in the window like they had never spent the time together, but over the days which follow Henri keeps his word; he takes Louis out again and again. Plucked from the porch, from his window seat, from any idle moment in which Henri can spot him and rope him into some time spent behind the wheel. And Louis goes willingly; more than willingly, becoming bolder behind the wheel, more assured of himself as the days pass. But really, the driving is only an added bonus to the main event, which is of course spending time with Henri. It feels exciting and borderline illicit, even if they’re doing no more than stealing away to go waste petrol on some B-road leading to nowhere, but Louis is sure it’s his parents’ not knowing that spurs that feeling. That, or the way Henri is beginning to truly warm up to him the more time they spend together. Louis finds its an easy place to talk; a car. The both of them staring straight ahead, attention fixed elsewhere as their mouths run.

He learns Henri has never done a minute more schooling since he’d left at sixteen. He learns that Henri was washing dishes in Paris, tending bar in Marseilles, and stealing in all those _here and there_ places he didn’t care to name. 

“Does it feel better to be earning honestly, now?” Louis asks him, after Henri had so easily divulged on his rocky late teens, on the thirty days he’d spent in some short stay prison just north of Mont-de-Marsan, and then the eighteen months spent in another in Lyon. 

Henri laughs; something hearty and surprised as if he’d never been asked that question before. “Of course it doesn’t,” he says, and he’d forgotten those sunglasses of his that day, so Louis is able to see his expression, to see the true bemusement on his face. “I was _rich_ ,” he says, and then makes a face, and amends, “Okay, I was getting by, but getting by _well_.”

“But it was wrong.” Louis doesn’t know what else to say; eyes on the road, mind swimming with questions, trying hard to understand what Henri could possibly mean. “Surely you felt guilty? Afraid of getting caught?”

“No,” Henri says, almost immediately, biting off the end of Louis’ sentence with how quickly he responds. “If you’ve gotta ask that, you aren’t gonna understand why I did it in the first place.”

And Louis pushes no further, because Henri’s right. The gulf of their understanding of each other yawns between them in that moment, and Louis had never felt further from him, not since those first few weeks of disinterest on Henri’s part, of slyly amused dismissal. Louis, with his big house and his private schooling and his charmed life. Henri, near two years spent in prison, with all the tattoos and the beyond-his-years wisdom to show for it. 

“I’m sorry,” he mutters, the two of them sharing the silence with a cigarette not long after they’d arrived back at the house. It had been a late evening drive; Henri’s list of things he has to get done is growing ever longer as the summer wears on, and their lessons have been getting pushed back later and later as a result. Now dusk is beginning to drop, turning the world into some moody cyanotype around them, the grounds coming alive with the noises of insects under the darkening sky. 

Henri exhales slowly, the smoke hanging between them in the still air. “For what?”

Everything turns to silhouettes against the pale blue evening sky. The navy outlines of trees, buildings, the distant spindly shapes of telephone lines. Henri’s face; handsome, sharp in its attentiveness, the flare of his cigarette the only speck of warm light against all the greys and violets and deep dark blues. Louis lowers his head, but Henri’s profile remains smudged on the inside of his eyelids as he lets them close, his emotions so mixed and muddled at the easy attraction he feels that his next words come out quiet, voice small as he murmurs, “I don’t know. For speaking on something I can’t understand.” He shrugs. “Passing judgement.” It doesn’t feel good to admit to it, but there’s something inside Louis urging him to right that particular wrong.

Henri hums, and when he speaks it’s not the words Louis had been expecting, been bracing himself for. Something like _spoiled rich boy_ , or, _you’ll never understand me_ , and worse. Instead, he tilts his head to the side, and even though the evening is dropping steadily darker around them Louis knows he’s looking at him with that measured, thoughtful look he’s been seeing and replaying in his mind for days on end. “Would you like to come inside for a drink?” he asks, and Louis shivers, caught between muteness and the desire to shout _yes!_ as loud as he can.

“I don’t drink much,” he settles for, and catches the flash of a grin as Henri ducks his head; wryly amused as he nods.

“Of course you don’t.” The cigarette makes its way back to his mouth; Louis watches the path of the glowing cherry, very orange against all that dark blue. “Coffee, then.” It’s not a question. Louis feels hazy, barely tethered to the gravel under his shoes. He can hear the radio playing inside; can picture the scene as vividly as if he was looking right through the window at it. His mother asleep in her armchair, his father silent and tired in the other. Annoyance bubbles easily to the surface after a long day at work for him. 

Louis wants to laugh. Here he is, pretending to mull over the question-that-wasn’t-a-question as if he hadn’t decided on his answer as soon as the words had left Henri’s mouth. 

“Coffee it is,” he says, sounding braver than he really feels, and Henri smiles, pitches his cigarette away as Louis tosses the keys at him. He catches them easily, the sound cutting loud through the quiet evening, and Louis images his father’s head jerking up at the noise, looking to the window for the source of it. He wonders if Maurice can see them, if he heard them talking. He wonders if he cares. 

The cottage is different now that Louis isn’t squinting through rain-blurred glasses at it; even in the dim evening light it feels transformed. The delicate purple wisteria that he hadn’t noticed before, trailing daintily amongst the twisting grapevines that canopy the front door, smells so floral and so fragrant that Louis feels near-dizzy from it. He watches Henri unlock the front door, painted the same peeling sage colour as the open shutters; wide, dark eyes in the pale stone face of the cottage. Beyond them he can make out the vague shapes of furniture, and finds a little thrill of pleasure in how he can map the interior of the place in his head. The familiarity is heady. After all, isn’t it incredible to know? 

The worn wooden door creaks as Henri opens it, and then a couple lights are switched on in quick succession, and Louis gets his second look at a place that has so occupied his thoughts since the first time he’d set foot there. 

“Oh,” he murmurs, closing the front door behind him as Henri steps further into the room, another lamp coming alive under his hand. “It looks different.”

Different; looser, untidier. More lived-in, more like a home in some odd and intangible way that Louis can’t quite put his finger on. The coffee cups in the sink. The toolkit spread out across the table, even the clothes hung over the back of one of the kitchen chairs. Louis takes another step in as Henri leans across his bed to open the window there with a grunt; the cool night air flows in, bringing with it the smell of the wisteria, the sound of the cicadas. 

“Dirty ain’t different,” he mutters, but he’s smiling when he turns around, eyes flicking quickly over Louis before he disconnects; heads for the kitchen, for the fridge and the beer inside. “Just gettin’ myself comfy in here,” he adds, and presents a bottle to Louis, who resists the immediate reaction to take a step back.

“Oh no,” he says, and Henri frowns, “I really don’t drink.”

The expression of contrition that floods Henri’s face is near comical, and Louis finds himself laughing even as Henri begins to apologise, a very out of character, “Sorry, Louis —” before he cuts him off with a wave.

“It’s fine,” Louis says, warm from the way Henri had said his name in his low, deep voice. He glances away just to try and hide the attraction he feels beams out of him like a searchlight; completely unmissable, unmistakeable. “Really, have your beer.” His eyes attach to the unmade bed across the room, wondering briefly if the wool blanket slung over the foot of it is as scratchy as it looks, before his attention is tugged away by the sound of the fridge door opening again; the clatter of condiments in the shelves.

Henri catches his eye then, and that easy smile is back as he says, “I fancy coffee more.”

For a moment Louis is speechless; quiet for so long that Henri just drops his gaze and turns to the stove, reaching for the tin of coffee he keeps on the high shelf above it as he lets Louis gather himself before he finally blurts, “You make a fantastic cup of coffee.” It feels stupid, like saying something for the sake of it, but he means it. He doesn’t know how else to express the warm feeling of gratitude spreading through him, stood awkward and still in the middle of Henri’s home. He feels seen, and it’s not a completely comfortable sensation just as well as it’s not entirely an _un_ comfortable one either.

A couple of mugs join the tin of coffee on the counter, and Henri sets the percolator to brew as he says, lightly, “Oh, I know.” The night floods into the silence that drops between them then, and Henri turns just slightly, just enough for Louis to catch that playful, borderline-sly look in his eye, and he realises just how transparent he’s being. He blushes; a prickly rash of heat across his nape, as quick as his realisation, and Henri’s eyes curve with his amusement as he turns to settle himself against the stove. From outside, an owl hoots; a low, eerie sound, and Henri folds his arms across his chest, an air of finality about him. Louis braces for impact.

“I’m surprised you knew enough to apologise earlier,” he says, and Louis knows his bemusement must show on his face because Henri laughs, and adds, “Don’t be so confused. You know what I’m talking about.”

God, what had he said? That apology earlier, outside the car with the taste of Henri’s tobacco in his mouth?

Henri is still talking, barrelling unbeknownst through Louis’ thoughts. “And you know, an apology is easy, actually.” His eyes haven’t strayed once from Louis’ face; blue and warm and overwhelmingly confident. Louis can’t glance away. “But you knew what you were apologising for.” He nods to himself, and breaks eye contact like it’s nothing, like Louis hasn’t been trying to for the past minute or so. There’s a smile playing around his lips, but he’s always been hard to read and this moment is no different. Louis swallows, and clears his throat.

“Is that surprising?”

Henri shrugs one shoulder. “A little.” The percolator is done brewing; the air in the cottage is thick with the dark, aromatic smell of coffee; Louis feels bright-eyed and caught out, still flushed through with the headiness of Henri’s attention, of the rich smell of the fresh coffee. “I don’t mean to be rude when I say I haven’t experienced a lot of honesty from your lot.” His eyes swing back around to Louis, who watches the muscles of his forearms flex; his fists clenching and releasing. “Honesty, or maybe, self awareness?” The pendulum of his gaze swings away once more, and Louis thinks, _they’re the same thing_.

“My lot?” Louis murmurs, lips barely moving. 

Henri grins. “The rich.” He unfolds his arms from his chest, and Louis thinks — _the butterfly, the woman, the straw coloured hair on his chest_ — in quick succession before Henri asks, “Are you interested in men?” and the whole world drops away.

 _You misheard_ , is his first reaction, once the shocked ringing in his ears fades out and Louis finds he can focus his eyes once more. The cottage swims back into shape in increments; and Louis repeats, _you misheard, you misheard, you misheard_ in his head until he feels dizzy from it, and has to close his eyes. Dimly, he realises he’d never even had the chance to sit down, and wishes badly he had; his knees feel weak from the shock of the question, from the icy prickle of fear that had started at the crown of his head and inched quickly and efficiently over his whole body.

And then Henri asks, “Is it because I said you were rich?” 

It’s the most frustrating, playfully amused tone, like he asks this question every day, like Louis is wrong for reacting in the way he is, that he snaps, “Well are _you_?” 

Silence rings between them, and Louis focuses back in on Henri’s face; at the expression there. Tight surprise, melting slowly into something wicked, and knowing. “Am I what?” he asks, like he knows Louis won’t ever be able to say the words out loud, and waits just long enough for the pause to be uncomfortable, to be telling, before he says, “I like both.”

“Both,” Louis echoes, numbly. “Is that an option?” His mind is a vast, still lake; silent, not a ripple breaking the surface. _Both_. It whispers over the water, picking up speed until it’s like a knife tearing through the mist rising over the surface, realisation dawning like a high, hot sun as every clunks audibly into place. He thinks of their flirtations in the car, at the windowsill, Henri’s handsome face dirty and glistening with sweat, pillowed on his arm as he accepts bread from Louis’ mother. The heat of the outside of his thigh, tantalising in his blue jeans, how his bulk had sucked the air from the tiny car they have spent so many hours sat in that Louis keeps a pair of sunglasses in it now. God — flirtations? Had he really just called them that?

Henri shrugs; expansive, languid. The aroma of coffee is stronger now; Louis fears distantly that it’ll burn off; stick to the metal. Henri seems to harbour no such fear, his eyes don’t stray from Louis’ face for a second as he smirks, and mutters, “There ain’t any rules.” His hands curl behind him over the lip of the counter, and Louis drops his gaze to his chest, imagining he can feel the black wings of the butterfly beating in his own ribcage. His words drop like stones into the calm blank pool that is Louis’ mind, and he feel the ripples shake him; shuddering down to his bones. 

The knee jerk reaction is to flee, of course. To walk out of Henri’s cosy little cottage and to return to his room, to his records, to his books. To a long hot summer spent alone and wandering the village, waiting for August to turn and for the new school year to start. And with that comes a number of things which he barely needs to think about to know they’ll be fact; no more speaking to Henri, no more ventures out in the car, no more sitting in the shade of the porch as he watches the man go about his day with that single minded languor that Louis finds so attractive — and he can call it attractive, now. Why not? The privacy of his own mind doesn’t feel as sacred as it used to; Louis can practically feel Henri’s blue eyes boring right down to his soul. Might as well admit to it in the confines of his own head, as it’s something easier thought than said, though easier ignored, pushed down, sidestepped around than to do either of the former. 

In his mind’s eye, he lingers in front of it, that amorphous shape that has so haunted his childhood, his teens. It’s smaller than he’d expected; this is the very first time he’s put eyes on it, inspected it. _Both_ , he thinks, and the thing shifts. _No._ He rubs at his eyes.

The night air is sweet and perfumed by that delicate wisteria, by the lavender carried in on the breeze. Very slowly, Louis murmurs, “How many more new concepts are you going to introduce me to, before the summer is out?” He drops his hands from his eyes to find Henri smiling at him, something very pleased in the curve of his mouth, and Louis sighs, and braces himself; thinks of sweat on golden skin, on comfortable old tattoos. “You’re very handsome. I think you know what I’m trying to tell you.”

“That’s not what I asked,” he murmurs, voice low. “But thank you.”

They regard each other silently for a long moment, Louis looking at Henri with brand new eyes. _You could never guess it_ , he thinks, and then feels guilty for it. As though sensing his awkwardness, Henri turns away, finally pulling the percolator from the stove; no doubt over-boiled and bitter, but pours it into the mugs he’d laid out nonetheless. 

“I can’t believe I just said that,” Louis breathes, eyes unfocused on the honey-warm light spilling over the floorboards from the side lamp, mind ticking over and over and over. Part of him feels the compulsion to backtrack, to try and snatch his words from the air before they drift too far afield; out of the cottage, out of the grounds, away from his control.

“Sit,” Henri says, and Louis sits. “Drink.” He places the mug in front of Louis, brushing close enough to him for all the hairs on his arms to stand up; hypersensitive after his revelation, after his sideways admittance of something he’s never had the balls to even admit even to himself. Henri sits opposite him in his comfortable old armchair, curling his big body up in the seat with ease as he watches Louis put spoonful after spoonful of sugar into his coffee. 

“’S gonna be bitter,” he mutters, catching Henri looking. He feels flushed to the very tips of his ears, prickly all over with Henri’s attention, with the knowledge passed between them. He tries his very best to sound neutral, natural, when he mutters, “You let it go too long,” but can hear the strain in his voice. He can’t look at Henri, can’t even look at his coffee; his reflection seems to be everywhere. Blinking back at him in the dark, distorted surface of his drink, superimposed over the hazy evening outside as the window bounces his image back at him. _Henri likes men too_ , he tries to tell himself, but can barely edge the words past the regret that’s beginning to well up inside him. _And women,_ , some nasty little voice pipes up, _at least he can pretend —_

“Are you okay?” Henri asks, and Louis breaks from the reflection in the window with relief, the spell broken.

“I’m okay,” he says, more out of the need to hear himself say it than there being any truth to it. Then he repeats himself, and then again; enough times for him to be able to meet Henri’s eyes, to believe his own words. “You won’t tell anyone?” he asks, and watches as Henri’s brows dip, something sad in his expression.

“If that’s what you want.”

“It is,” Louis says, quickly. “My parents —”

Henri holds up a hand, and Louis drops into silence. “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna go around telling your business.” He shrugs. “Hell, you couldn’t even say it yourself.”

Silence. Just the shift of the trees outside, the faint noise of Henri idly flicking his thumbnail against the side of his mug. _Ting_. Louis can’t find a response, and knows that Henri can see that; can see that he’s caught him, trapped him and pinned him in a glass box of his own making.

“Say it,” He says, blue eyes dark in the low light. Louis swallows.

“I don’t know,” he breathes. And Henri waits, patient, eyes steady on Louis’ face. There’s no threat there, no force in his words. Louis supposes he really just wants to hear it; wants to free Louis from that locked up little cage inside of himself. He takes a deep breath, and then murmurs, “I like men.” The words cling to the back of his throat with how badly they want to be left unsaid. Immediately, he wishes he could scoop them back inside, his hands tightening around the hot sides of his mug in an effort to keep from grabbing thin air. Henri is grinning, something triumphant in the line of his smile.

“There,” He says, leaning back in his seat. “Was that so hard?”


	2. Chapter 2

Louis wakes puffy and tired the next day. He’d slept fitfully, uncomfortably, the anxiety in his chest making it hard to relax, hard to manage his nervous racing thoughts. He’d seen the sun rise over the tree line, and then slept a couple hours more, waking late enough in the day to be disappointed with himself, to wish he’d risen with the cool morning sun. He feels sweaty, sticky, sick with the heat that had risen in his bedroom as the day had gotten hotter, and stumbles his way through a cold shower followed by a hot cup of coffee that both do little to improve his mood.

Every time he tries to distract himself, his mind drags him right back into last night and the afternoon that preceded it. Driving along that seemingly endless strip of road. Louis would never have been able to dream of what kind of confessions Henri would be cajoling him into not hours later. He thinks of bitter coffee, wisteria on cool night air, and the steady blue eyed gaze that had speared him so completely. The new knowledge of Henri’s own leanings is the only thing keeping Louis’ head above water in the wake of his own admittance; he feels less alone, less exposed. Henri would never rat him out or else his job would be on the line for sure, and if Louis knows that than Henri certainly does. So the day slips by with a kind of uncertain ease; Louis keeps himself to the house, mostly. Clinging to the porch, eyes on the grounds with his heart in his throat, beating away a mad tattoo against his voice box. No book can keep his focus, no sketch can draw his attention; he settles for laying prone on his bed with a record playing as loud as he can bear through his headphones. 

He naps; dreams of blonde hair by afternoon sunlight, of deeply suntanned skin, and wakes to find the record spinning itself silent in his ears. It reminds him of something, some semi-pivotal warm summer evening weeks ago, and goes to the window just to try and recreate it, just out of some blind hope all muddled up in the dreamy sleepiness still clinging to him. But the grounds beneath his window are empty, the hot mid afternoon sun beating down harshly on the world beyond his bedroom; the air above the terracotta orange roofs he can see is wavy, shimmering in the heat. When Louis inhales he can smell hot earth, hot grass, and longs for something to cut through it. The coolness of a riverside breeze, the smell of silt and green water. He half wonders if Henri has been to the river yet, and then dismisses the thought before it can fully bloom.

Dinner is a quiet affair; Louis eats with his head down and tries not to take up too much space. His father is annoyed by work besides, and tends to suck all the air from a room when in a bad mood, so Louis needs to do little besides be quiet to fade into the background. His mother too; drunk and strangely cowed to his father’s left. Louis wonders if they’d fought while he was upstairs, then decides a heartbeat later he doesn’t really care. His own problems seem so pressing he can’t spare a thought towards something as childish as his parents’ fighting. Not when Henri is out there, harbour of Louis’ secret, of his uncertain affections. 

The neck of the bottle of his mother’s wine rattles against the side of her glass. Louis watches his father snatch it from her with something close to deadened resignation settling over him. “That’s enough, Celeste,” he mutters, and Louis doesn’t stick around to watch the resulting fallout — his knife and fork clatter to his plate and he stands, mutters a quick _excuse me_ that neither parent respond to, and escapes to his bedroom.

Sometimes he doesn’t know whether he prefers being ignored or having all eyes on him. Both feel as bad as each other. He wishes he had a sibling; not for the opportunity to submit another person to his parents dysfunction but to take the pressure of witness and target from himself, even if for a second. And then he feels guilty for the thought, guilty for subjecting this nameless, faceless, lifeless brother of his imagination to his parents expectations, to their ambivalence. It’s for him and him alone; his cross to bear, his penance for something he’s only now beginning to wrap his head around. 

His room smells like freshly cut grass when he throws the door open to collapse at his desk, and this vague reminder that Henri is out there, that he’s probably mere metres away getting ready to wind down for the night, is oddly comforting after that tense, silent meal he’d just endured. Louis likes that he can picture Henri’s ritual well; likes that he can guess at what the man may be doing at this hour: a little past dinnertime, but the night hasn’t dropped completely, and the world still holds the last vestiges of the daytime heat. Drinking a beer, probably, windows wide open to encourage the insects into that warmly lit room. The scratchy wool blanket on the bed — pure fiction, Louis has never touched it — the comfortable creak of the armchair as he settles back into it. It’s easy to invent, easy to imagine, and Louis had always been prone to becoming lost to fantasies as a child and that hadn’t changed at all with time. Celeste calls it his artistic side; Maurice calls it something far more unpleasant. 

He reaches for his sketchbook without thinking, the image of Henri so sharp and so vital in his minds eye that it feels urgent to record it, to give life to it. The room slips away, his anxiety slips away, everything that isn’t the paper under his pencil; his parents’ raised voices from downstairs, even the very distant slide of a sash window that he recognises all too well; and is pleased to recognise the recognition. Letting the night in, letting the scream of the cicadas in, the delicate perfume of the flowering trellis that climbs the walls of the cottage. 

When he focuses back in the room is dark around him; only the narrow strip of light coming in under the door from the hall giving him anything to see by. A glance at his watch shows an hour and a half passed — an hour and a half of blissful, thoughtless creation, and with that step back into reality comes the widening of Louis’ attention. The windows of Henri’s cottage are dark, unseeing eyes through the deep blue night. On the sketchpad in front of him a familiar face peers out; broad-cheekboned, mouth caught just in that moment before a smile — impish, like he’s in on some joke you could never hope to know. Louis is still waiting. He smears the graphite with his thumb, absently blurring the vagaries of Henri’s profile as the night sounds swell in the silent room.

—————

“You’ve been avoiding me.” 

It’s not a question; Louis at least has the good grace to look ashamed before he mutters, “No, I haven’t.”

Henri has managed to corner him at last; caught him while Louis was coming back from town in a move that could only be pre-meditated. _He noticed me leave_ , Louis thinks, trying to press down the little pleased thrill that thought gives rise to inside him. They’re both stood under the dark cherry trees that line the drive, the fruit sticky and fragrant under the feet, mashed into the gravel and stinking of something vaguely alcoholic as they rot. Their old family dog used to eat them until she got a stomach ache; a little white terrier that his mother used to dote on. She used to stain the fur on her muzzle with her love for the things.

“I know when you’re avoiding me,” Henri says, drawing Louis’ thoughts from memories of sticky red berries, the fermented smell of them on the dog’s fur. Again, that little dart of pleasure. _He knows me_. The light is dappled through the trees, dappled on Henri’s handsome, serious face; Louis wants to draw him, wants to squirrel away with his sketchbook as he’s made a habit of doing and record him. “Is this about the other night?”

“If I _was_ avoiding you,” Louis begins, taking a slow step to the side in an attempt to pass Henri, “— Which I’m not — why would it be over that?” He can’t say it out loud, can’t even acknowledge it really. His mother is sat on the lawn a couple hundred feet away; Louis can see the black span of her parasol just rising up over the hedges that border it. She has the ears of a gun dog, so he can’t risk her hearing. 

Henri neatly intercepts Louis’ efforts at slipping past him, something amused beginning to tug at his expression when Louis grinds to a halt, unable to keep his irritation from showing on his face. He’s sweating in the close afternoon heat, sweating from his trip up that long, steep hill that leads to the house. The cigarettes he’d bought at the bottom of it aren’t quite proving worth it so far. “So if you’re not avoiding me,” Henri begins, his amusement fully blooming on his face now, even as Louis lets his own expression slip into a scowl — or perhaps because of it. Louis knows Henri’s type well; the type of guy to get a kick out of irritating someone. “Then you’ll let me make you some lunch, huh?”

Louis is slow to respond, finally muttering, “Why?” He can’t work out Henri’s angle; isn’t entirely sure if he wants to with his mother so close by. Henri steps a little closer as though he’s just as aware of her proximity as Louis is, and he smells like good clean sweat and little beyond that; so appealing and masculine that Louis feels slightly disarmed by the attraction it has washing over him. Suddenly, stupidly, he thinks he’d go anywhere that Henri asked him to.

“Lemme apologise,” he murmurs, voice pitched low. His finger touches the back of Louis’ hand; his arms crossed rigid over his chest, and he stubbornly bunches his shoulders up higher, not yet entirely convinced. “I was annoyed with how you spoke to me the other night, but I shouldn’t have made you say anythin’ you didn’t want to.” He shrugs, stuffing his hands in his pockets as his face twists; true contrition. “I felt vulnerable so I wanted you to feel it too.”

Louis doesn’t know how to respond straight away; stood there silent with the smell of the rotting cherries and Henri’s sweat in his nose, brain ticking through his words slowly, one by one. Henri is watching him; something expectant in the line of his body, and Louis knows he needs to respond but can’t think of where to even begin. He hadn’t wanted an apology; he hadn’t known he even warranted one. “Okay,” he settles on, finally, a placeholder for any real response, and then, “I’m not sure how to feel about that.” And it’s true; he can’t thread just one emotion from the tangle in his head, but supposes surprise is right at the forefront there. Surprise, vague upset. The memory feels tainted just very slightly now, with the knowledge of Henri’s quiet vitriol, his efforts to drag Louis down to his level. He’d never pegged him for a person like that, and isn’t sure what to do with the new knowledge of it. 

“That’s fair,” Henri is saying, rocking back on his heels a little as he casts a glance back over his shoulder. Louis understands it; he feels watched too. “It was wrong.”

The part that seems to be sticking the most in Louis’ mind is that he really doesn’t actually _care_. Yes there’s the vague sense of hurt to it, and yes he’s been anxious and on edge since he’d uttered the words, but it feels somewhat overshadowed by the overwhelming sense of relief that’s been making itself known in increments since that night. He thinks of earlier, days ago, realising that this meant that he and Henri were bonded so completely together now in a strange allyship of shared secrets. It was a nice feeling. Nobody in the world knows him like Henri does now. 

But he finds he can’t say this out loud: can’t quite commit to the relief he feels. He needs more time with it, time to see how real it is, how long-lasting it is. His relief could turn to regret in a moment and it seems like something they both know; Henri’s glance back over his shoulder, the ants-under-his-clothes itch that Louis has been feeling since, waiting for his parents to somehow find out. But for now, it’s relief, and he doesn’t see any point in drawing Henri’s apparent guilt out any further — especially since it feels undeserved in some small but significant way. _If it had to be anyone, I’m glad it was you,_ Louis wants to say, but can’t muster the words.

“Well I could eat,” he says, a sideways acceptance of Henri’s apology, and Henri smiles; the worry lifting from his expression. Back comes the sly playfulness, and he nudges at Louis’ arm.

“I knew you were avoidin’ me,” he mutters, and laughs at Louis’ answering roll of his eyes. “C’mon, I wanna show you somethin’.”

They chat as they walk; or rather Henri does. Louis is quiet and nervous at his side, too aware of the eyes of the house on their backs as they take the narrow flagstone path that dips down towards the cottage; nodding along as Henri talks to him about work. They’d had to pass his mother, and although she’d barely glanced from her book Louis knows that she’d noted him in Henri’s company. He’s sure there’ll be questions down the line. He’s been braced for them ever since Henri had started taking him out driving. 

“— And as long as the frost doesn’t get ‘em it’ll be perfect,” Henri is saying, hands in his pockets as they amble along beside each other. Louis hadn’t realised how much he’d missed their quiet, understated companionship in the days that had passed, how lonely and bored he’d been rattling around that big house and trying his best to keep his head down. 

“They’ve got you on vegetable patch duty?” he asks, just as the cottage comes into view. It looks the same as it had the other night; the sage green shutters peeling in the sun, shadowed by trailing wisteria and that thick, twisting grape vine. Sweet and squat and yellow, the shutters all open despite the strong afternoon sunlight. Louis can’t escape the odd surge of affection he feels when he sees it; this little place that feels so far removed from his parents’ house, in distance as well as atmosphere. 

Henri shrugs, toe of his boot to the door as he shoves it open with a practised ease. “Nobody else doin’ it.”

“Tell me you’re at least gonna keep what comes up.” Louis says, following him over the threshold into the cottage. Henri throws him a grin over his shoulder, making a beeline for the sink.

He throws the tap on before replying, eyes on his hands as he scrubs at the nails under the water. “If I were plannin’ on that I wouldn’t admit it to the son of the man I’m stealin’ from.” 

“Is it stealing if you grew it?” Louis asks, feeling lit up warm and pleased at the look that Henri throws him at that. “Besides, I’m his son in name only. I’m not gonna rat you out.”

“You’ll be pleased to know that lunch is stolen, then,” Henri murmurs, wiping his wet hands on his pants as he turns from the sink. He grins; disarmingly handsome, and Louis is helpless to do anything but return it. He feels comfortable for the first time in longer than he’d like to think: sat at Henri’s kitchen table with his smile levelled at him like that, all the warm and familiar smells of the cottage in his nose. Tobacco and scrubbed wood and ground coffee. Henri’s white shirt is worn thin enough to see his tattoos through the fabric; dark, amorphous shapes that Louis wouldn’t be able to pick out if he didn’t know them so well. That coquettish lady’s head, the butterfly, the flowers, the sailor to match the woman. He wants to touch all of them, to find out if tattooed skin feels different compared to bare skin.

Henri makes beetroot and ham sandwiches that they eat sat at his table; shooting the shit about nothing in particular until they finish, and then Henri makes coffee, and Louis asks: “What were you gonna show me?” And Henri smiles at him like Louis is in on some secret he doesn’t even know about yet, something close and familiar and very warm which flushes Louis right up to the tips of his ears.

“Okay, follow me,” he says, and leads Louis away from the main room of the house, away from the part of the cottage he knows so well into that shadowy little offshoot of a corridor he’s been wishing he could map for weeks. His heart is in his throat for some reason; some happy little anticipation that has more to do with the excitement of finding out what Henri had wanted to show him so bad over anything else. Henri is broad shouldered and near-imposing in the narrow corridor; they pass a white tiled bathroom that smells like Henri does; musky cologne, clean shampoo, and then at the end of it they’re spat out at the back of the house through a little weathered door just the same shade as the shutters, peeling and flaking in the sun.

It takes Louis a second for his eyes to adjust to the bright light of day after the dimness of the hall. A garden swims into view behind his squinted eyes, overgrown and a little wild, though each part of it feels so lovingly crafted that he knows Henri must’ve worked magic on whatever the back of the house had once looked like. A long mound delineates the cottage garden from the treeline that towers over the place, and cobbled-together fences complete the square. Wildflowers, the sparse, stubbly starts to new grass, a pretty red rhododendron that sits still in its nursery pot beside a dug out trench, presumably its eventual home.

“Did you do this?” Louis asks, the flagstone underfoot wobbling a little as he takes a step forward into the garden; not yet worn into the ground, brand new and still slightly temporary. A ramshackle and humble little toolshed slopes from the side of the cottage, a cluster of well-used tools leant up against the side of it. Brown wood, the peek of a window; the glass wavy and old, distorted. 

Henri is stood just to his left, and when Louis glances at him for an answer he’s struck dumb by the expression on Henri’s face; open fondness, affection. Louis wonders if he’s shown this little slice of his own world to anyone else yet, or whether Louis is the first one to be trusted with setting foot in it. “Some of it was like this when I got here, some of it I just dug up and moved around. “ He shrugs, but the gesture can’t obscure the pride in his expression as he looks out on it. “This is pretty much the only thing I’m doin’ when I ain’t cuttin’ your grass and stealin’ your veg.” He shoots Louis a sly look, to which he rolls his eyes. “What d’you think?”

“It’s lovely.” Louis murmurs, and means it. The rickety little bench hunched by the rhododendron, the unsure little flagstone path and that slumped shape of the toolshed. It’s charming, so carefully put together and kept up that he knows Henri has probably spent more hours tweaking it and messing with it than he’s spent enjoying it. 

“My own little slice of home,” he says, hands on his hips as he looks out over it. “All mine. Can’t see it from the house so it feels like I got some real privacy.” He laughs, and drops his hands, digging in his back pocket for the ever present little pouch of tobacco there, the cardboard fold of papers, a lighter. Louis watches him pinch the tobacco into the paper between his fingers, mind ticking through that statement. He thinks of the yellow windows he can see through the dark most nights, the shadow of the cottage if he cranes his neck just so.

“You can barely see the cottage from the house,” he says, some attempt to comfort Henri which he regrets as soon as the words leave his mouth. Henri frowns, the line of his mouth playful as he lowers his cigarette.

“What,” he murmurs, blue eyes steady and curious on Louis, backlit by the sun and terribly handsome in its light. “You’ve been looking?”

Louis stutters through the beginning of a couple excuses that Henri doesn’t listen to besides; just throws him a grin and tilts his head in the direction of the toolshed, a silent invitation to come look. Louis follows blindly, unsure of what could be interesting in a shed to see, but so embarrassed by his comment and the easy way that Henri had dove to the bottom of it that he can’t find the words to tease him about it. 

“You’ll like this,” Henri mumbles, smoke a veil around his head as he lets his cigarette hang from his lips, needing both hands to work at the rusty little sliding look holding the door closed. “Nearly caught somethin’ awful hauling all the rusty shit outta here, but once I got it scrubbed up it was pretty nice —” He grunts, pulling the lock free, and the door creaks open, Henri taking a step back to gesture Louis forward. “Take a look.”

Inside is dim; a stream of light from that little window illuminating the dust specks hanging in the air, illuminating shelves, a desk, a comfortable little leather desk chair that looks like it’s been dug up from some antiques market. Curious, Louis takes a step in, and the light from the doorway drops away as Henri settles his big body up against the frame. 

“What d’you think?” His voice is easy, open. The rasp of his cigarette fills the silence. 

Louis slides his hand along the desk; a good, heavy thing, real oak and dotted with clutter. A stained mug of coffee, a jam jar bristling with pens and pencils, and unsteady pile of dogeared paperbacks that Louis gravitates to; flipping the one on the top over to see the one underneath. A lot can be learned by the second book in a person’s to-read pile. Cannery Row. Louis sets it aside. 

“You turned your toolshed into a —”

“Writing room, yeah.” Henri sounds pleased, and when Louis glances back over his shoulder he’s smiling still, cigarette making a trail between mouth and hip. 

“You write?” he asks, and Henri shrugs, eyes dropping to the floor as he ashes between his boots. 

“I’ve got shit to say. A life lived, you know?” He grins, eyes flicking up to meet Louis’. “You ain’t the only creative one.”

Louis laughs, nudging at the leg of the chair with his foot to straighten it. “Never said I was, but good to know I’ve got competition.” Uncovering new little facets of Henri is thrilling; every time he opens himself up a little more to him Louis feels like he grows bigger in his eyes. Bigger, more real; less a violently handsome figment of his imagination, some shade he’d daydreamed up because he was lonely and wanting for friends his own age. _A writer_ , he thinks, and immediately wants to read some of his work, to delve even further into the rabbit hole that Henri is proving himself to be. “Can I read something?” he asks, and Henri scoffs.

“So you can get your academic ideas all over it?” He shakes his head. “Nah, it ain’t done, ain’t polished or nothin’ you’re used to reading.”

“I don’t care!” Louis insists, but Henri is already turning from the doorway, letting the light free to come flooding back in. Louis feels frozen in it, like he’s on some big stage, standing up there in front of his audience of one. And Henri’s expression is tender, horribly so; Louis doesn’t know what to do with his hands, feels looked at and over-aware of his own expression, his own body. 

“You ain’t nothin’ like what I thought you’d be,” Henri murmurs, and then leaves him there, struck dumb and processing that innocuous little statement for a dragging moment of uncertainty before he gathers his wits and follows Henri; back out into the sun, back out into that fragrant little garden full of herbs and flowers and life. Somehow it feels fundamentally different to the manicured lawns beyond, the precisely kept borders and rigid little hedges; as wild and changeable as Henri seems to him, in that moment.

He finds him fetched up against the side of the house, face lowered as he taps the ash piling at the end of his cigarette onto the floor. The brick is sun-warmed and rough when Louis leans against it, and without even looking at him Henri passes him his cigarette, which he takes after only a moment of hesitation. Behind him, the ivy that has sunk its vines deep into the brick below bends and breaks under his weight; the smell of crushed foliage bitter and pungent in his nose. 

“The ivy is beautiful,” he murmurs, leaning his shoulder up against the side of the house as he hands the cigarette back to Henri, who is watching him with something very warm in his blue eyes. He hooks a finger in the brittle little vines, and tugs. “Such a beautiful cottage.” 

“It’s ruined,” Henri says, carelessly. He smiles, and turns too; the both of them fetched up against the wall, soaking in the warmth of the day like two sun-starved lizards. “The ivy ruins the stone, if I pulled it out the whole place’d crumble.” The breeze moves the trees, tousles Henri’s once-cropped blonde hair, now just overgrown enough to make him look boyish, sweet. 

“Oh.” The shutters shed flakes of sage green onto Louis’ shirt as he shifts, taking a half step back to widen the gap between them both. Henri’s mouth twitches, covering up his smile a second later with his cigarette, and Louis mumbles, lamely, “Well, it’s still beautiful.”

Henri hums, tipping his head to the side. “Most things are.” And then, “If you wanna use the shed you can, if the house is getting you down.”

“Really?” he asks, and Henri inclines his head, leonine and handsome under the sun’s touch. Up close, Louis can see the freckles under his suntan, the beginnings of that scruff of blonde beard he finds so attractive. “Thank you,” he murmurs, suddenly come over all shy under Henri’s quiet, appraising gaze. He eases his thumbnail under a chip of flaking paint, anything to have to meet those eyes, his heart high up and aching in his throat; a mix of anxiety and anticipation. There’s something in the air between them, something thick and charged that’s making him flush down his chest. He can feel it, a prickly, sensitive heat brought up under Henri’s attention, his kindness. 

“Have you forgiven me?” Henri asks, crowding closer to Louis, who feels sweaty and nervous and overstimulated, caught between that peeling green paint and the bulk of Henri’s body. The smell of his sweat, intimate and personal, goes right to Louis’ head; he feels near-drunk as he fumbles out a noise he hopes sounds considering. Henri’s mouth pulls into a smirk at the sound, and he takes another deliberate step closer. “Gonna keep avoidin’ me?”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t let me,” Louis breathes, the crown of his head to the hot, chipping paint at his back, arms by his side. Very gently, Henri touches his thumb to the thud of Louis’ pulse, to the open, exposed underside of his wrist, and presses him back against the blazing hot brick. His boot is nudged in between Louis’, and he feels pinned by that one, gentle touch; pinned fast like a bug under glass. Henri’s fingers curl against the back of his hand, light as a kiss, and Louis knows he could tear away from his grip easily, effortlessly -- so why does he feel so caught?

Louis breathes out, a shuddery little exhale that he knows gives him away immediately; he sees Henri’s gaze sharpen, sees the corner of his mouth lift before he murmurs, “If I kiss you now, will you avoid me all week?”

“I don’t know,” Louis murmurs, and swallows. Again, that thought — _are we?_ He thinks of faded tattoos under suntanned skin, the weight of his sketchbook on his lap. He doesn’t dismiss it this time. “Maybe you should try.”

Henri grins at him.“I don’t know,” he murmurs, and his thumb presses just so to the bundle of green veins under Louis’ skin. Hard, harder. The sun-hot brick against the back of his wrist, the entomologist’s needle stirring between the thin bones of his hand. “I don’t wanna risk it.”

How is it he can be held so fast by a touch so light? Louis feels rooted to the ground, his breathing shallow in his chest as his eyes flick over Henri’s face, his expression cool and confident and just edging towards playful. “I think you should,” he says, bolder than he feels, limp against the hot brick, limp under Henri’s touch, and then that thumb traces its way from wrist to palm, and Louis thinks of ivy sinking itself deep into the foundations of the world, of fragrant rotting fruit, of coy girls with pin curls and demure sailors with moustaches, of the smell of a house barely lived in, of Henri, of Henri, of Henri.

His thumb is a nail through his palm. His mouth on Louis’ is more overwhelming that he ever thought was possible; he’s not a shy virgin, not some cherry who’s never been kissed, but it’s been women and only women and up until this point Louis has never known the pleasure of the scrape of stubble, of a large work-roughened hand at his jaw, and now he feels as though he’s drowning in it. And he does so. Does so gladly that the world drops away and the water rushes up to meet him; white noise in his ears as he lets it swallow him. No more garden, no more cicadas birds grasshoppers, no more looming house, no more warm, flaking paint at his back. Henri’s fingertips stroke at the hollow behind his ear, and like some button has been pressed Louis opens his mouth, and the wet slide of their kisses grows deeper, more insistent. He’s being pressed so solidly to the shutter behind him Louis hears the wood creak, but can’t register properly; there’s nothing but Henri’s tongue in his mouth and the buckle of his belt against his stomach. _Can’t see it from the house_ , Louis thinks, _my own little slice of home._ He can feel it too. 

They part, though only just; Henri’s hand strays to the back of Louis’ neck, cupped warmly over his nape as he kisses the corner of his mouth, his cheek. Like now he’s started kissing him he can’t stop. Louis feels drunk on it, swaying forward to follow Henri’s mouth even as he moves away, for good this time. The sun hits Louis’ closed eyelids, warm red light, and he blinks them open to find Henri’s face closer that he’d thought it’d be. The look in his eyes brings Louis over all shy suddenly, and he ducks his head with a snort to stare at their feet, Henri’s boot pushed in between his own.

Silence. Just the sound of trees and the cicadas, the creak of the shutter at Louis’ back as Henri urges his face back up and kisses him again; a slow slide of lips that feels more deliberate, now. His face is hot, the nape of his neck searing under Henri’s gentle touch, and every point in which their bodies touch feels lit up; a burning point of heat. His nape, his mouth, his wrist, the hard metal of Henri’s belt buckle and the press of his hips behind that. The promise of something — the vague hope of something. When they part for the second time they stay parted. Henri has this charming, lopsided smile on his face, and his hands cup Louis’ cheeks gently for just a moment before he disconnects; takes a step back until the sun is haloing his blonde head and Louis has to squint to see his expression.

Fondness. Quiet happiness. “Don’t run,” he murmurs, and grins at the eye roll Louis responds with. “You want a beer?” he adds, and this time Louis nods. He doesn’t know if he’ll drink it; afternoon drinking feels too much like Celeste for comfort, but he needs to be alone for a second and can’t think of any other way. His heart is pounding in his ribcage. His shirt is sticking to the small of his back with sweat. “Okay, don’t move.”

The back door bangs shut, and Louis lets his knees give out, sliding to the ground. His mouth feels heavy, well-kissed, and he touches his fingers to his lips in dazed disbelief as he stares dumbly off into the garden. Henri finds him in the same position a couple minutes later, coming through the back door with two beers swinging from his fingers and a cigarette unlit between his lips, and the look he shoots him is puzzled, a cautious smile curling his mouth as though he can’t work out whether he should tease or comfort.

“You okay?” he mumbles around his smoke, his shadow falling over Louis, face obscured by the sun behind his head. Louis turns his eyes up to him, and drops his hand from his mouth — wonders if he looks as bug eyed and spooked as he feels. He thought he’d feel dreamy and dazed from the kiss when it finally came, and it’s shocking how awake he actually feels. Everything is crystal clear and gorgeous, and all he wants is more.

“You’re the first man I’ve ever kissed,” he murmurs, wonderingly, and there’s a beat of silence — just the birds and the bugs and the trees — and then Henri huffs, and bends over to set the beers in the grass before taking a seat next to Louis with a groan. 

“Okay,” he says, and reaches for one of the beer bottles. Mechanically, Louis follows suit, shuffling close to Henri’s side once he’s retrieved it; shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. Henri sighs and stretches his legs out in front of him, the knees of his blue jeans grass stained and muddy. The glance he throws Louis is playful. “Was I really that bad?”

Louis wants to kiss him so bad he can barely stand it; clenches his hand around the condensation-slick bottle and wills himself not to let it show on his face. The press of his belt buckle to his stomach. Louis feels all hot and sticky and flustered at the memory. “No, I just —” He breaks from Henri’s kind blue eyes to stare at the bottle in his hand, edging his thumbnail under the sticker on the front as he mutters, fast, “I didn’t expect that happenin’ when I came down here.” He pauses, and Henri just drops his head back against the side of the cottage they’re sat against, takes a pull from his beer bottle. “Did you?”

Henri hums. “Louis, I think I’ve been waitin’ to do that since I saw you in your bedroom window that night.” Smoke curls from his nostrils, his eyes fixed sightless on the near distance as he adds, “Maybe before, maybe I just didn’t know it.”

“You didn’t like me,” Louis points out, and Henri laughs to himself.

“You ain’t wrong.” 

Later, when Louis drags himself from Henri’s cottage to slope back up to his bedroom to hide out for the night, his mother corners him; drunk-gentle and smelling heavily of alcohol as she catches him by the wrist. And Louis’ heart had leapt in his throat as soon as he’d seen her; he feels it’s so obvious what he’s spent his afternoon doing that it must be stamped all over his face. _I’ve been kissing men_ , he thinks, as Celeste peers at him, her frown two lines between her brows. _I sat on his lap and I kissed him until I was hard._ He’d been half-drunk on it when he’d taken the steps to the porch, and now that feels a lifetime ago, that teenage feeling of silly pining long gone under his mother’s gaze.

“Darling,” she mumbles, her white, bony little hand locked tight around his wrist. They’re stood in the entryway of the house; Celeste in her nightgown, though it’s only eight o’clock, and Louis smelling of sunshine and cigarettes and — he fears — Henri’s home. “You’re covered in something.” 

His heart stops. 

Her hand moves to the back of his head, to his shoulder, and in the dim light of the hall Louis can barely make out what she presents to him on the tip of her outstretched finger, until it all slides together and horrified understanding washes over him. Sage green paint chips. Henri’s goddamned flaking shutters. “I —” he stutters, brushing uselessly at his shoulders as his mother watches him, curious and just slightly vacant as he scrambles for a lie. “The tabac in the village, I stopped outside for a cigarette and the bench —” He trails off, trying his very hardest to wipe the panic from his expression as Celeste looks again at the flecks of paint stuck to her fingers. Her long dark hair falls forward, obscuring her face from him just slightly; Louis watches her lips move, and when her eyes lift to meet his again there’s something very shrewd in them that belies the smell of Pastis on her breath. 

“Your father doesn’t know what I know,” she says, her voice soft, quiet. Louis’ breath catches in his throat, and stays there: he’s breathless, speechless, fear creeping like a shadow over him. Then she tilts her hand away, rubbing her fingers together to let the few loose specks of paint flutter to the ground. “Let’s keep it that way, Louis.”

He can’t remember who moves first; his mother, drifting through to the other room, or him, uprooting himself from the dark slate floor to stumble up to his attic room as fast as his stunned legs could take him. All warm thoughts of his and Henri’s afternoon together are gone, pressed to nothing under the weight of the true panic that is seizing him. His bedroom is dark; the furniture looming black shapes until he switches a lamp on and it all comes into familiar focus. Louis is sweating, his breath still short, images of blonde hair and green paint and a tiny little writing desk spinning through his mind as he paces from door to window and back again. The floorboards creaking under his feet as he tugs at his hair, upsetting the evidence of his afternoon spent pressed against all four walls of that private little cottage at the end of the garden. 

God. Is it so obvious in him that all one has to do is look at him and _know_? Henri had known, and he couldn’t be the one exception; couldn’t possess some supernatural ability to tell if someone was a queer at a glance. He sinks his fingers into his hair again, coming face to face with himself in the wardrobe mirror. His wide, panicked eyes behind his glasses, the nervous set of his mouth. Just an hour ago he was kissing Henri, a hand to his broad chest as he pushed him back against the headboard, thoughts of _are we gonna —_ and _how much further should I —_ swimming through his head. His chin still feels tender and sensitive from Henri’s stubble scraping him, and now he feels so frightened, so unsure, that the compulsion to race back to the safety and the pleasure of the afternoon is hard to ignore. He can’t meet his eyes again so he turns from his reflection, to his desk, to his window; the sketches of Henri’s face littering the top of it, the lit windows of his cottage beyond. He’d asked Louis to stay the night, had looked so gorgeous and well-kissed that it had practically hurt to say no, but Louis wished he had now. His mother would never have caught him in the hall, would never have plucked sage green paint from his hair and undone him so completely with that evidence alone. 

The breeze that flows through the window as he cracks it is warm, full of the sounds of early evening. Louis closes his eyes and lets himself breathe it in for a moment, willing the nerves to ebb and flow inside him until they’re only lapping at the shores of himself. He feels sick. Pit of his stomach anxious nausea, the same he used to get when he was a kid. He’s always been nervous, always to his detriment. His father hated him for it. 

_I can’t stay here._ The thought pops unbidden into his mind, and once it does it’s impossible not to cling hold to, impossible to ignore. Louis has never been a person to act on impulse but he abandons his reflection; abandons his bedroom, creeping quietly down the staircase right on the outer edge of the stair so as not to make any noise. The house is silent and near-dark around him; he figures his mother must have turned into bed, his father must be up there reading and smoking, annoyed by her drunkenness. It’s eight o’clock, and the grounds are full of the sound of cicadas; their song rises and falls in waves as Louis walks quickly and surely towards the amber lights of Henri’s cottage. The garden drops away beneath his feet, and he takes the small stone path down with a singleminded kind of recklessness rising within him. It’s unfamiliar but not unwanted; this is the push that he’s needed. If his mother had come to him weeks ago and presented him with some once-invisible and unknown proof of his sexuality he thinks he may have done the same thing. It’s no coincidence that Henri arrived at the time he did, no coincidence at all. His hands are tingling; oddly numb in the warm, late evening air. He can smell grass, can smell the flowerbeds, and bunches his hands into fists as he skirts the side of the cottage, aiming for that wild, romantic little garden. Somehow, he knows exactly where Henri will be.

The smell of cigarette smoke. Henri almost looks startled when he spots Louis; his eyebrows raising by a fraction as he turns to look at him. He’s dragged a chair out from inside, one of the mismatched kitchen table chairs, and Louis’ gaze jumps from the glowing cherry of his cigarette to his beer, to the bunch of his blue jeans at the junction of his thighs as though on impulse. He feels hot, warm all over. _Your father doesn’t know what I know_ , he thinks. 

Henri speaks first. “Couldn’t get enough of me?” he drawls, and Louis ducks his head, embarrassed by his sudden appearance, embarrassed by Henri’s tipsiness. All of a sudden he wishes he didn't come, but if he can’t come here then where can he? Henri seems to sense his awkwardness, as he straightens up in his chair, sets his beer bottle between his bare feet. “Hey, you alright?”

“I —” Louis begins, with no idea of where the sentence was really headed. He stops, and swallows, and thinks of the chip of paint on his mother’s outstretched finger. “I just wanted to see you.” He remembers how wide awake he had felt after Henri’s kiss, like everything finally made sense, like everything had finally swum into focus. He wants that feeling back; doesn’t want to feel so muddled up and anxious as he does now. 

Henri is staring at him, something unreadable in his expression.

“Are you okay?” he asks, again, and Louis goes to him; words caught up in his throat as he bends to kiss him, just as Henri’s hand settles against his face and draws him near. Vaguely he wonders if his mother’s words have pushed him to this, or whether he truly came here under his own volition. Henri has been occupying such a significant amount of his brain for what feels like so long now that this seems almost a natural progression. Stranger, friend, and then more. He smells like tobacco and warm skin, like the sweat of a long day, and Louis wants to make a home inside Henri’s chest, right below that butterfly tattoo. But he settles instead for kissing him; hard and far less careful than the kisses they had exchanged earlier. Henri had handled him like something meant for a life behind glass, something fragile and precious and stupid, even when Louis had straddled his lap and pressed the hard line of himself to Henri’s stomach. It makes him want to scream. The paint in his hair, the paint on his mother’s hands. He’s tired of everything happening to him as though he’s something to be cherished, he’s tired of everything happening in whispers and glances and unsubtle little threats. 

The beer bottle gets knocked over when Henri stands, dragging Louis to his front as the liquid inside glugs away into the grass. A hand at his waist, the other on his ass; Louis feels flushed down his chest at the touch, and has just enough mind to gasp, “I’ve never done this before,” when he feels Henri’s hardness press up against his hip. No belt buckle now; Henri is warm and relaxed and tastes like beer and cigarettes, wearing a shirt so worn and soft that Louis grips his hand in the back of it just to feel it. Right between the shoulder blades, so he can feel the shift of muscle under his hand as Henri pulls away, open curiosity on his face.

“Never?” he asks, lips full and pink from Louis’ biting, desperate kisses.

Louis’ eyes dart. “Not with a man,” he murmurs, and Henri’s expression settles into one of soft amusement. 

“It’s not so different,” he says, stroking his hand up Louis’ back as he draws him close again. His lips find Louis’ jaw, his tongue grazing his adam’s apple before he adds, “I like bein’ on the bottom anyway.”

Louis can hear his pulse in his ears; that and little else. He wants to be naive, wants to ask _are we gonna —_ and _does this mean —_ but doesn’t want to embarrass himself, doesn’t want Henri to stop what he’s doing. They sway together, stood pressed chest to chest in the warm little pool of light that falls from Henri’s open window, and he feels a little far in over his head, just as much as he feels that this is exactly what he wants to be doing. And he can barely process Henri’s words; knows it’s best not to because to even think about Henri suggesting he fuck him like a girl is just too much to bear. He can imagine it, too. The lean, suntanned bulk of him spread out on the sheets of his bed, Louis’ hands at his ankles as he —

“Let’s go inside.” His voice sounds strange to his own ears. Henri rears back from the kiss with a snort, an open expression of amusement there in his face, lips kiss-heavy and eyes dark in the dim evening blueness. 

“You sure?” There’s an edge of something challenging in his voice. “Did your parents see you come down here?”

Louis shakes his head, no intention of telling Henri about the exchange passed between him and his mother. That’s for the two of them and nobody else. Dimly he’s aware that he doesn’t want Henri to know he’s been found out himself. “They’re in bed,” he murmurs, and slides his hand from Henri’s back to the nape of his neck. “Does it matter?” He doesn’t want Henri to know his mother is the worst of them all. 

The lights bounce off Henri’s teeth as he laughs, and they separate, though Louis catches at the tips of Henri’s fingers before he can step fully from reach. He clings on, stubborn, and watches as something fond and relenting creeps into Henri’s smile. “Fine,” he says, and no more is exchanged between them — Henri leaves the chair, the beer, the light on, and leads Louis by the hand into the small, dim cottage that for some reason seems changed since the last time he had set foot in it. Hours ago. The bed is still rumpled from their kissing, and it’s easy to press a hand to Henri’s broad chest and urge him back towards those unmade sheets. And he grins, pleased and huge, cat that got the cream.

“You really want this?” Louis asks, as Henri sits down at the edge of the bed, Louis’ thumb now resting at the base of his throat. He feels brave, feels very unlike himself. In control, confident; it has something to do with the mindless way that Henri is tilting his head back, exposing the bare expanse of his throat to Louis in that gesture of submission that transcends any language. He’s handsome and golden in the low light, that amber light Louis can see from his bedroom, blue eyes heavy lidded and mouth just parted in a smile that seems almost mocking. 

“I do,” he murmurs, voice rough in the dark room. “I don’t get the chance to get fucked too often.”

Ordinarily, Louis knows those words would have embarrassed him or made him shy, but all they do in that moment is send a spark of helpless arousal though him that’s difficult not to crumple around. He slides his thumb up over the knot of Henri’s adam apple, watching it bob as the man swallows thickly around nothing. “Am I gonna fuck you?” he asks, voice distant, and Henri laughs; amused even with Louis’ thumb pressing to the corner of his mouth.

“I hope so,” he says, and Louis thinks he can almost understand the eagerness. It’s just short of shocking to him that a man that looks like Henri likes it…like _that_ , so maybe it’s been a while or — And then he’s talking again, barrelling over Louis’ idle line of thoughts. “Or I could just do you, it’s — I like that.” His eyes shine in the low light. Louis’ dick throbs idly in his pants.

“I’ve never done this before,” he says again, voice quiet, because he really wants Henri to hear it. He presses his thumb to the full shape of Henri’s lower lip, feeling heavy and settled and present and _nervous_ but in that fluttery excited turned on way. “I want to, but —”

Henri’s eyes soften, the insistent thrum of anticipation seeming to leech from him a little. It leaves him mellow, sweet, opening his mouth under the press of Louis’ thumb just to curl his tongue at the tip of it. Louis shivers, a full body thing, before pulling away, and Henri grins, and murmurs, “How about you take your shirt off?”

Absently, Louis feels a little embarrassed for his inexperience. For the fact that Henri is guiding him through this, that he can’t just pin Henri to the bed and fuck him like he so obviously wants. He grabs at the back of his shirt and pulls it over his head, glasses half coming off in the same motion, hair standing on end by the time he fights himself free to blink down at Henri, who’s still smiling. 

“Havin’ some trouble?” he asks, and reaches up to fix Louis’ glasses straight. His thumb brushes over his temple, over the curve of his cheekbone, and Louis has to fight to not close his eyes at the gentle, tender touch. He hadn’t expected it to be like this. He doesn’t know what he’d expected when he’d marched his way down through the twilight to the bottom of the garden, but it hadn’t been this. Henri’s hands on his face, on his chest, the low throbbing arousal in his stomach and the prickly, all-over heat of it. He feels flushed and warm in the close room, head spinning as if he was drunk, not just near-overwhelmed and turned on. And Henri can see all that; Louis can tell. It’s there in the curve of his smile, in his blue eyes alive in the low light of the room. Dark, big pupils. Louis doesn’t know what to do with himself, being wanted like this.

It all comes out in a rush. “I’m sorry, I —” and, “I want you, I really do, but I need you to —” Louis cuts himself off, mortified. Henri is watching him with something measured and fond in his eyes. 

“Need me to tell you what to do?” he murmurs, and Louis has to glance away as he nods. Embarrassed, flaming ears, even if that smooth, soft tone in Henri’s voice has his dick perking up again. Louis only ever slept with women who told him what to do; who sat in his lap and brought themselves off while he clutched at them. Hands around their waists and wondering just what was wrong that he wasn’t feeling anything for them, beyond the pleasure of wetness around his dick. He supposes there’s something Pavlovian in it, something comfortably arousing in Henri muttering, “Undo your belt.”

It clatters in the quiet room. Just them and their breathing and the sounds of the night. Henri draws his hands down Louis’ sides, and he shivers at the touch, at how Henri’s thumbs almost meet in the middle when they skate down to rest at his waist. “You’re so small,” he murmurs, as though he’s never noticed before. And then, “Unzip your pants.”

“I’m sorry this isn’t what you wanted,” Louis mumbles, head ducked as he fumbles with the fly of his pants. “I promise, next time —”

Henri laughs, then. Something genuine and amused in it. “Next time?” he teases, hooking a finger in the waistband of Louis’ underwear to edge him closer a little. Louis dutifully allows himself to be pulled forward, stepping between Henri’s spread knees as he worries his lip between his teeth. “Louis, it’s okay.” He still sounds amused, even as he leans close to press a kiss to Louis’ bony sternum. “You’ve just gotta get confident. Gotta get comfortable with it.” Another kiss, right there to the soft skin above Louis’ belly button, right above the patch of hair on his stomach. “Take over whenever you’re ready.”

Louis closes his eyes, concentrates on the feeling of Henri’s mouth on his skin as he slides his hands home into his hair. Louis twists his fingers in it as he breathes out slow. His dick is so hard it’s aching, untouched and not pleased about it. Absently, Louis drops a hand to slide over the front of his pants, and Henri makes a soft noise against his skin, eyes flicking up just at the moment that Louis opens his. Blue blue blue. Blue eyes near black in the blue evening light. Louis’ breath feels caught in his chest and he swallows thickly, unable to break the hypnosis of Henri’s eyes. Those pale lashes. His hand tightens in Henri’s hair as if by reflex, and the noise Henri makes has Louis’ dick twitching under the press of his palm. Again, that mental image which he’d shied away from earlier flashes past his eyes. Henri, on his back with Louis’ hands at his ankles, at the back of his knees, holding him open as he twists in the sheets. He doesn’t shy away from it now. Not with Henri’s teeth at his nipple and his hands on Louis’ hip, his ass. Are they really going to? Is this real?

“Anythin’ you want,” Henri murmurs, and it takes Louis a second to realise that he must’ve been speaking out loud. It makes him flush a little with embarrassment, and Louis smears a hand over his face as Henri squeezes playfully at the backs of his thighs. “Louis?”

“Can I —” he begins, and then changes tack. Braces a hand to Henri’s shoulder and pushes him, just gently, just testing the waters. The grin on Henri’s face is blinding. “Lie down,” Louis murmurs, emboldened, and Henri goes easily, willingly, arms over his head and shirt riding up high on his stomach as he watches Louis move haltingly for the fly of his jeans.

“You don’t have to ask,” he says, cutting off Louis before he can even open his mouth. He’s still smiling, face pressed to the tattooed curve of his bicep, and what Louis can see of his face is pleased, comfortable. He opens his legs up a little wider, some silent prompt for Louis to snap back to the matter at hand, and his smile grows when Louis pops the buttons of his fly in one quick pull. He’s not wearing any underwear, which is barely the biggest shock of the night but still manages to send a pulse of thready arousal through Louis’ stomach. He has to bite back on asking, and feels like Henri can tell. It’s there in the ghost of a smirk on his mouth, the way he cocks his eyebrow at Louis when he glances up to see if Henri is watching him. His mouth feels dry. He doesn’t want to mess this up but he’s remembering his first, awkward time with a woman and knows that maybe messing it up is all part of it. 

It’s that which steels him, which oddly enough makes him feel more confident as he sets a knee to the edge of the bed so he can lean over Henri and kiss him. Henri responds eagerly, hand coming up to curl in the back of Louis’ hair. They break away and Louis kisses at Henri’s neck, his jaw, the shell of his ear, and together they push Henri’s pants to his knees. Louis wants to _look_ but Henri’s hand is back in his hair and he’s opening his mouth on a low moan as Louis’ hand touches smooth hot flesh and — 

“I wanna suck your dick,” Louis murmurs, and it’s not a question but it’s enough of _something_ to make Henri frown playfully at him. Golden and very handsome with that flush of pink at the tops of his cheekbones. Lips red from Louis’ mouth, his teeth. And he’s so hard in Louis’ hand that Louis knows Henri would probably agree to anything right now; he can see in the dip of Henri’s eyelids the effect his words have had on him. The slight parting of his lips. Time feels slowed to a sticky, intimate slipstream; like they’re moving in slow motion compared to the dark blue nighttime world all around them. The light catches the thin gold chain around Henri’s neck, winking in the low lamplight as he props himself up to pull his t-shirt over his head. Louis wants to dip his tongue into the hollow of his throat, wants to taste his nipples, the flat of his stomach, wants to nuzzle his face into the light blonde hair there. 

Louis kneels on the carpet. Henri’s hands pet soothingly through his hair even as he urges him closer, and the stirrings of arousal are so insistent now that Louis can’t help but press his hand to where he’s hard and aching in his trousers. Henri’s cock in his face; hard and flushed and thick, and Louis had thought he’d be struck with trepidation once he was on the cusp of this but all he was wrong. He _wants_. More than he ever has in his life. And Henri’s hand is curving under his jaw, and he’s murmuring soft, sweet things as Louis curls his fingers around the length of him that taper off into a moan. As soon as he makes that noise Louis knows he wants to hear Henri like that over and over, and he ducks his face into the crux of Henri’s thighs just to smell him, that musky masculine scent times a thousand. He feels drunk on it. Henri just laughs.

“Louis,” he mutters, voice very low and deep in the quiet room. Like Louis has done more than just touch his dick. He flops back onto the bed from where he’d propped himself up, and Louis has to sit higher up on his knees now at the change of position. It sets him between Henri’s thighs; pale compared to the deep gold tan everywhere else on him. Soft blonde hair like a fuzz. Louis pinches him, feeling stirred up with another pulse of boldness, and grins as Henri laughs again. “You forgetting something?” he asks, and his hand touches to the curls at Louis’ crown, gentle, urging. “C’mon.” His eyes are big and dark in the soft, diffuse light. 

Louis is helpless to obey. 

Henri’s hand drops away from his hair as soon as Louis gets his mouth around him, like he can’t bear to do anything but _feel_ it. Can’t uproot his fingers from their clutch in the bedsheets to guide Louis to what he wants. It ignites a pleased warmth in Louis’ chest, as he sucks hard and sloppy at the head of Henri’s dick, hand gripped tight around what he can’t fit in his mouth. Spit wets his fingers. Henri moans under him. Maybe he’s doing this right, maybe this is right after all, maybe —

“You feel so good,” Henri breathes, and Louis wants to echo it, wants to tell him how good Henri smells, how good he tastes, how it feels to have him hard and throbbing in his mouth but can’t take his lips from around his dick to say it. All he manages is a hum, to which Henri laughs at — breathless, drunk on pleasure. When Louis risks a glance up Henri’s cheeks are pink, hair gold in the low, warm light of the room, tattooed chest heaving as he skates a hand over it. Palm on that butterfly. The picture is so tender it makes Louis ache, and whether it’s from arousal or affection he doesn’t know. Is there any difference, anymore? He grips at Henri’s thigh, and surfaces for air, breathless like he was the one getting his dick sucked. Henri is there to grin at him, to rake his fingers back through his hair, fondness in his eyes, in the curve of his smile. It just makes Louis want to please him more, to give him everything that Henri wants and then some, whichever way he wants it. Again, that mental imagine of Henri with his thighs spread flashes through Louis’ mind. His fingers tighten on their grip at the crux of the man’s legs. 

“Tell me if you want more,” Louis finds himself murmuring, and is shocked for a second by his rough and low his voice sounds. Arousal, but something else, some physical tell of what he’d just done. That salt-musk taste in his mouth. As soon as he becomes aware of it, he wants it again; hand splaying out on the fuzzy flatness of Henri’s lower stomach as he moves in close to lick over the head of his dick, to swallow him down again. The noise Henri makes is wounded, like it’s been wrenched up deeply from inside of him.

“Jesus,” he says, and then, “Louis, you like that?” His voice is shot, and deep, rumbling up from his chest. Louis fumbles with the fly of his pants, belt clicking in the silence as he curls his tongue at the head of Henri’s dick, just teasing at him. 

“I’ve never done it before,” he mumbles, like Henri doesn’t already know that, like he wouldn’t be able to tell even if Louis hadn’t said anything. “I like it so much.” It’s nothing like the sex he’s had before; it’s getting him so hot and hard that he can’t help the moan that escapes him as he pulls his dick from his fly and tugs on it. 

Henri’s hand finds his hair again, thumb sliding over his temple, over his cheekbone. Louis tilts his face into the touch as he touches himself, mouth open and wet and bruised-feeling, his jaw aching — Henri slides his thumb over Louis’ lip, and he catches at it, bites at it, playfully. “You’re doing so good,” Henri murmurs, and Louis lights up all over, has to squeeze at the base of his dick as it jumps in his hand. “Keep going.”

They melt back into each other. Louis doesn’t know anything but Henri, now. His taste his smell the heat of him, the weight of him in his mouth. His jaw aches. The floor is hard under his knees. Still, he closes his eyes and he takes Henri into his mouth as deep as he can go, swallowing down around him until he feels lightheaded from more than just the arousal fogging his head. His own dick is hard and wet in his hand; Louis has long since stopped touching himself for fear that he’ll spill on the floor before Henri gets his own. And he’s determined that Henri gets his pleasure before him. Louis can tell he’s close; it’s there in the strain in his thighs, the way he can’t tear his fingers from their knot in Louis’ hair, the noises he’s been making ever since Louis had started sucking on him in earnest. Low, sweet little sounds that are making Louis feel distinctly wolfish in some far-off way. Like he wants to rub himself off on all that golden skin, wants to smell like Henri, wants Henri to smell like him. God, he wants to eat him whole, he wants —

Henri’s hand tightens in Louis’ hair, breath hitching in his chest as Louis pulls away from him, just in time for Henri’s release to spill against his lips, over his knuckles. The noise he makes is intoxicating; Louis barely puts words to the urge to open his mouth to taste him before he’s doing it, mouth to Henri’s dick jumping in his fist, as he comes hard over his belly, over Louis’ fingers. Salt-musk, but sharper, stronger. It ignites an urgent need in Louis that he’s never felt before; an aching, feverish thing. He’s standing between Henri’s thighs before he registers even moving, stomach tight with anticipation, pulse thudding a tattoo in his temple as he puts a hand to the back of one muscular thigh, and pushes.

Henri goes with the touch easily, lounging like some fallen sated god in his sheets. Blueblack eyes, cheeks flushed and rising in a playful, sleepy smile as he huffs out a laugh. Knee to his chest, bared for the world to see and not caring one bit about it. Something about that makes it hotter. Louis slips the wet head of his dick against Henri’s hole, eyes unable to settle anywhere on the man as he jerks at himself desperately, mouth open and panting as he chases that thread of arousal that’s been coiling inside him since Henri had kissed him. Henri’s softening, wet dick at the crux of his legs, the come on his belly and the sly little smile he’s levelling him with. 

“Next time you can fuck me just like this,” he murmurs, voice low and drawling. The sheen of sweat on his chest; Louis can feel one on his own just the same. Glasses near-fogging, how embarrassing. _Next time?_ he wants to tease, but the words can’t make it up past the moan in his throat, and then he’s coming hard and slick against Henri’s ass, fingers digging into the meat of Henri’s thigh as he squeezes his eyes shut at the feeling of it. 

They lie together, afterwards, enjoying the afterglow, enjoying a cigarette. Sweaty skin pressed to sweaty skin, the night breeze cool and fragrant carrying in through the open window. Henri heaves himself up at some point, to go wash himself in the bathroom, and Louis stretches out on the scratchy wool blankets on the man’s bed and listens to the faucet run. Outside the cicadas are screaming and the grasshoppers are trilling, but everything inside the cottage is dim and quiet and warm. Everything smells like Henri, even Louis himself, he likes to think. He feels sated and tired but so brightly awake at the same time that he knows he won’t sleep for hours. Orgasm thrumming through him, rocking him softly like waves, but not close to sleep. He wants to run, he wants to shout. Wants to bellow up to that big, dark, uncaring sky and boast about how he’s one step closer to the man he’s maybe meant to be. There’s not a thought spared to his mother, to the looming spectre of the house beyond the roll of the lawns; only this moment exists. His face in Henri’s scent, his mind blissfully blank.

Henri paces back through to the main room, nude and glorious with it. Louis watches him, stirrings of the wolf in his chest once again. He can’t stop thinking of their sex, can’t stop thinking about the way Henri had looked at him as he’d come. Already, he can feel his soft dick stirring with the memories. 

Judging by the glance Henri throws him, he can tell. “You look like you’re in a good mood,” he quips, as he braces a hip to the side of the sink and pours himself a glass of water. He gulps it down. Louis watches a bead of water trace its way from mouth to jaw to neck, transfixed. 

“That was my first time with a man,” he breathes, reaching out a hand for the glass as Henri refills it and offers it to him. 

He grins. “I know.” And then, “Do you wanna sleep here tonight?”

Louis blinks at him. “Here,” he echoes, the glass cool and wet in his hand. Through the window comes the low chorus of bullfrogs, carried on the night breeze. 

“It’s late,” Henri says, turning away to pull a pair of underwear from a drawer. “I know it isn’t far, but.” He shrugs one shoulder, scratching at his chest as he crosses the room to join Louis on the bed again. He presses his lips to Louis’ shoulder, hand curling at his waist. “It’d be nice.”

His parents probably wouldn’t even notice. They barely take any notice of him; they’ll just assume he’s sleeping in, they think he’s lazy enough as it is. Louis thinks of his mother’s pale hand in the darkness of the entry way. Suspicion isn’t knowledge, she can’t accuse him of a thing. Louis closes his eyes, and before he can talk himself out of it says, “Yes, yeah, of course.”And Henri makes a pleased noise against his skin, grazing his teeth over Louis’ shoulder before he straightens up and kisses him on the cheek, carelessly affectionate. 

Henri drops off to sleep quickly, his big warm bulk pressed up against Louis’ side, snores rumbling through the mattress. It’s cosy. Louis lets himself drift, too wired and awake to really sleep, but just comfortable enough to try. Henri’s bed is huge and surprisingly soft; easy to melt down into. So he does. Laid on his back with Henri tucked under his arm like he isn’t double Louis’ size, eyes tracing the knots and lines of the wooden beams in the ceiling, mind ticking over and over trying to process the night. Never did he think when he woke this morning that this would be where he’d end his day. Past midnight, the cottage dark around him, all the unfamiliar dark shapes of Henri’s furniture looming out of the pooling shadows. Henri’s breath on his throat. The sense-memory of how he had tasted in Louis’ mouth. 

Is this going to lead to trouble? Louis isn’t adept at just letting nice things be nice. He feels distinctly like he’s done a bad thing, even though he hasn’t felt so clear-headed in a very long time. The two parts of him feel at odds with each other; butting heads under his breastbone as Henri sleeps peacefully nearby, sweetly oblivious. It was bad. It was good. His father would kick him out, cut him off. Would that even be such a hardship? 

The bed creaks as Henri shifts, and his hand smoothes over Louis’ stomach; big, work-roughened and warm. “Go to sleep,” he breathes, voice dragging with tiredness as he tucks his face into Louis’ neck once more. Louis’ heart squeezes, and it’s too warm in the bed with the sheets and with Henri pressed so close to him, but he burrows in closer despite it. “Woke me up you’re thinkin’ so loud,” Henri adds, a half asleep slur.

“Sorry,” Louis whispers, but Henri is already asleep again, palm hot and protective over Louis’ stomach. His brain quiets, thoughts retreating.

After a time, he sleeps.

—————

In the morning they go again, Henri’s face tucked into Louis’ neck as he mouths at the skin there, hand moving under the covers. Close, intimate, all of the calluses on Henri’s hands making Louis shiver all over. 

“Please,” he murmurs, pushing his hips up into Henri’s hand as he scrabbles at his side, some desperate, unspoken urge to have him spread out on top of him. Somehow, Henri catches the fragment of thought, nips playfully at Louis’ earlobe before he settles the weight of himself on top of Louis, who groans, clutches hard at his sides. 

“Wanna rub off on me?” Henri murmurs, lips close to Louis’ ear. He can hear the smile in the other man’s voice. “Is that it? Wanna cum with my dick up against yours, huh?”

Louis doesn’t have it in him to respond. He couldn’t even if he wanted to. Instead he moans, voice catching in his throat on some stupid, uncensored thought that barely makes it out of his mouth intact, and then he’s spilling between their bellies. Henri makes a noise at that; something dragged up from deep in his chest, aroused and pleased and a little shocked. His dick slides better against Louis’ now, his belly and the bowl of his hips all wet and slick with his cum. So wet it’s hard to tell when Henri follows him over the edge a few heated minutes later; only the way he clutches at Louis’ thigh hard enough to bruise him the only indicator, until he flops onto his back and Louis can trail his fingertips through the mess on his stomach. 

“Fuck,” Henri mutters, dazed. Louis murmurs his agreement. 

Then: coffee, scrambled eggs, sunlight hitting Henri from behind and turning him angelic, despite the dirty start to their morning. They eat squashed together on the little bench in Henri’s garden, plates on their knees and dew wetting their bare feet. Too early for the sun to have any real force behind it, yet. Watery cool morning, and good hot coffee. Heaven. He’s not even thinking about his mother, or his father, or home at all. 

They share a cigarette, one which Henri makes Louis roll seemingly just to laugh at him as he fucks it up. 

“I don’t smoke these!” he cries, doing his best to salvage the situation. Henri, leaned up warm and familiar against his shoulder, snorts.

“Smoke enough of mine.”

“Yeah,” Louis mumbles, licking at the cigarette paper. “Well.” 

“Well,” Henri parrots back, playfully mocking, and takes the shove it earns him with a grin. “Hey,” he says, as he plucks the cigarette from Louis’ fingers and pulls it apart, sets about rolling a fresh one. “Let’s go for a drive later.”

“A drive?”

Henri shrugs a shoulder, eyes on the cigarette he’s rolling deftly in his lap. “Sure. It’s been a while. You ain’t ever gonna learn if you don’t do it.”

Louis hums, uneasy. With mention of the car comes a reminder of the house, the recollection of his mother’s languid, drunken presence hot on its heels. Easy to forget since he’s been so distracted, but far less easy to ever disconnect from. He swallows. How far can they push their luck? Surely she’ll notice him coming over the grounds with the morning dew, still dressed in the clothes she had pulled a flake of telling green paint off the night before. How far is too far? Would she even say a thing?

Henri is looking at him, curiosity in his blue eyes. Louis hesitates, and then drops his eyes to his lap. “I don’t know,” he says, truthfully. Staying the night in Henri’s bed was one thing; Louis isn’t sure he’s brave enough to make their easy closeness any more evident. His mother may be a drunk, but she’s nothing if not watchful. Nothing else to do all day, rattling around the house as she is. 

“’S only obvious if you make it obvious,” Henri says, and pauses to light his cigarette, to puff on it until the end is glowing. “We’ve spent plenty afternoons out for a drive.”

“I know,” Louis says slowly, “But…” He shrugs. He can’t think of a ‘but’, and Henri can tell: his smile turns sharp.

“But nothin’, we’ll go.” He takes a pleased drag from his cigarette, and slouches in his chair a little. “Go for a swim, bring some food.” He grins. “’S gonna be a hot one today.”

“How can you tell?”

He nudges Louis’ side, passing him the cigarette easily, and there’s something impish and attractive in the line of his smile that has Louis leaning in for a kiss. Quickly, covertly, like they don’t have the cottage shielding them from view. “Because I want it to be,” Henri says, and his big, warm hand finds the nape of Louis’ neck, and he kisses him again. 

—————

Louis waits until after lunch to sneak into the kitchen, dodging the housekeeper as they run into each other in the parlour with a ducked head and a muttered hello. He can feel the man’s eyes on him as he slips into the kitchen, and tries to remind himself that the housekeeper is his father’s creature, not his mother’s. Maybe he doesn’t report on what Louis gets up to at all anymore, maybe that was something reserved for his teenage years only. 

The kitchen turns up a small feast, as it usually does. Louis stuffs a baguette and a little paper-wrapped pat of butter into the bottom of one of the cook’s shopping bags, follows it up with a selection from the fruit bowl; plums, apples, a couple huge oranges, all tied up in a muslin cloth. The fridge turns up a few slivers of cheese and some chicken breast; leftovers from last night’s skipped meal, Louis is sure. They join the rest of his bounty in the bag, along with a greasy little tub of sardines and a frosty bottle of rosé that Louis knows has no chance of disappearing without his mother noticing. Something about the sneaking around is making him brave. He’s sure he’ll regret it later but for now he feels young and daring and a little unlike himself, and so the shopping bag finds a home tucked down behind the passenger seat of Henri’s little car, full of his ill-gotten goods. 

A detour to his bedroom for his sketchbook and the slim tin of his pencils, and then he’s rushing down the stairs, onto the porch. The sudden sunlight blinds him, enough that when Henri calls, “Catch,” he has to squint to see him, and fumbles the keys just as he always does. And Henri laughs, near doubled over like he’s actually that funny, and then he folds himself into the passenger seat and Louis sets the car to life under them, and they’re off. 

The feeling of watching the house drop away in the rearview is indescribable. With every street that Louis puts behind himself and the cool, oppressive atmosphere of his childhood home, the lighter he feels. By the time they hit the long hot stretch of country road, he’s grinning at absolutely nothing, and Henri’s eyes curve fondly whenever he catches Louis’ gaze. 

“You light up once you’re outta those gates,” he murmurs, busy with a cigarette as they jolt along over potholes and uneven tarmac. Louis just hums, eyes on the road and the shimmer of heat above it in the distance. The car smells like Henri, like tobacco smoke and hot leather, and Louis knows that for a time he can almost convince himself that this is all he has. That everything in the world exists within the little body of Henri’s car. 

“Let’s not talk about it,” he says, and glances to the side to catch that fond look in Henri’s eye again. He’s gorgeous, the sun in his mouth and in his hair and catching his lashes pale gold. Louis’ heart squeezes painfully in his chest. He _wants_. Wants in a way he’s been unconsciously ignoring for years.

“You’re the boss,” he says, easy, and turns away to look out the window. “Watch the road. Turn’s coming up.”

The turnoff is down a long dirt track, the dust hot and yellow and choking until Henri rolls his window up. Pine trees on either side, hiding the sun from them. They bounce along over the rough ground a few minutes, before the track opens up and the sun forces through the thick trees, leading them to a little riverside clearing. Flat, hot stones, half dipped in the river water lapping at the earthy bank, that green smell of water and rotting pine needles. Louis pulls the keys from the ignition and the car goes still, nothing to break the silence that settles over them like a comfortable blanket. Just the sounds of the water, of the leather seat creaking as Henri stretches, and then reaches for the door. 

“How’d you find this place?” Louis asks, following Henri out of the car and watching him raise his hands towards the hot coin of a sun above them. He groans, and his back clicks. 

“Gotta knack for it,” he says, and grins. “I can sniff out a place people don’t know about easy as anything. Now c’mon,” he gestures. “Get that food out, I’m starved.”

The wine makes its way into the cool water to chill, and Henri lays a blanket from the trunk of the car onto one of the rocks, half shaded by a scrubby little tree but hot as hell against Louis’ bare feet. They lay their spread out on the bag Louis had loaded it all into; the butter half-melted from the inside of the car, but easier to spread on the baguette that Henri wastes no time in tearing into chunks. He hands one to Louis, who sways into his side, unable to stay too far away from him. He’d been afraid it might be awkward between them after their night together, the following morning spent tangled up in each other, but it’s not. As easy as breathing, as easy as Henri makes everything look. He swaps out his buttered piece of bread for Louis’ unbuttered one with a little nudge to his side, and when Louis takes a bite it’s warm, crusty, salty; better than anything he’s ever tasted. 

“I could get used to this,” he murmurs, dreamy from the sun, from the beautiful view of the river stretching out endless on either side of them. Somewhere, a fish jumps; all Louis hears is the splash, all he sees is the ripples of the water to show where it had been. Henri chuckles, a low sound, hands greasy from the butter and from the chicken as he loads it up onto his bread. 

“Feels good,” he agrees. “Too nice a day to be sweating over your father’s hedgerows.”

Louis doesn’t say anything, just settles in close to Henri’s side, happy with the closeness, happy with how happy he feels. It’s more than the fact that they get to steal away for an afternoon spent by the riverside, but he has an inkling that Henri knows that. 

Together they work through the bread, through the once-cold meat from the fridge. The two of them laid out on that rock soaking up the sun; Henri shirtless with all his tattoos sunning themselves as well, stripped to his underwear with the pale blonde hair that covers him catching the light. His belly, his chest, his legs. The darker hair under his arms. Louis props himself up on an elbow to kiss him, arousal a sleepy tug in his gut, and Henri hums as he returns it. His hand comes up to stroke Louis’ bare back, a sweet, gentle touch that Louis can’t help but melt under. He feels Henri smile against his mouth.

“Wanna go by the river, huh?”

Louis snorts, and flops back down onto his back. “I’m not that brave.” He screws his eyes up against the red press of the sun to his face, the black behind his eyelids pink and orange and warm. Wishes for Henri’s round little sunglasses. “Are you?”

Henri laughs. “I’m known to be that brave.” And then, “Wanna go for a dip?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Louis says, emphatically, his whole body covered over in a sheen of sweat. He sits up, lets his eyes adjust to the bright world, to the light reflecting off the water. The dip between Henri’s nipples where the butterfly rests is shiny with sweat, as is the hollow of his throat, his forehead. Louis presses a fingertip to the butterfly’s dark body. “C’mon.”

“Heat’s got me sleepy,” he murmurs, but levers himself up all the same, abandoning his glasses to the shady side of the blanket before standing. Louis sticks a hand up, and Henri catches his wrist, pulls him up with an exaggerated groan. 

A cool breeze shudders the surface of the water, catches in Louis’ hair. Henri sighs and tips his face towards it, lingering back with his toes curling in the gritty mud at the riverbank. Louis steps away from him to wade into the water, gasping at the shocking cold of it as it parts around his ankles, his calves.

“Nice, huh?” 

“Freezing!”

Henri laughs, splashing a path past Louis, who shrinks back from the fallout. “That’s what’s nice about it,” he says, shuddering pleasantly as the water settles around his hips. He jerks his head, eyes playful. “C’mon, it’s easier if you go in all at once.”

Louis, shoulders hunched, shakes his head. “I’ll leave that to you.” And Henri just tips him a wink and doesn’t wait a second longer, drawing in a comically over exaggerated breath that makes Louis laugh, before he plunges himself into the water. Louis watches the sleek, pale line of him, indistinct in the green water, his own skin goosepimpling as he edges deeper in. 

Henri resurfaces, hair flat to his head and water streaming down his face, and is grinning at Louis before he even opens his eyes. He laughs when he does, treading water slowly as he watches Louis ease into the water. “Just go for it!” he calls, pushing his hair back from his face and using the same hand to shield his eyes from the sun.

“I can’t,” Louis throws back, eyes on his feet underwater, pale as fish. The rocks underfoot are slippery, slimy, and the last thing he wants to do is slip and lose his glasses in the process —

Henri’s hands, unmistakeable, huge, and cold, grabbing firmly at his waist. Louis tries valiantly to fight it, a grin on his face even as he slaps his hands to Henri’s wet chest and shoulders, and the other man is laughing, triumphant as he manages to get a good grip around Louis’ torso to drag him bodily into the deep water. 

“You —” Louis sputters, water in his mouth, browngreen-organic-tasting. He spits, and Henri is laughing and laughing, eyes crinkling as he pulls Louis in close to his chest. “Oh, you asshole,” Louis says, unable to keep his own laughter in as Henri presses his wet nose to Louis’ cheek. “Let go of me.”

“Didn’t even notice the cold, didya?”

Louis squirms in his grip, chin up to keep above the water. “Not with you hauling me in I didn’t.” He knows he has nothing to fear; Henri’s hold on him is concrete and the riverbed is within inches of his toes, but Louis has never been a strong swimmer. 

“Then it worked,” Henri says, and the foot kicks at the riverbed; Louis feels his leg ghost against his. They drift further out, the two of them flotsam and jetsam all tangled up together. Bouncing along in the gentle current. “Put your head under,” Henri urges, loosening his grip enough on Louis’ waist to let him float at arms length. He puts his arms out, treading water, and glances down the length of the river. 

“Got my glasses on,” he says, distracted, eyes out for any stray bodies spending their afternoon as he and Henri are. The river bends not far from their picnic spot; the place feels like it’s all their own. The sun is beating down hot on his head, made hotter by how cool his body is now that he’s in the water. Henri had been right. All the splashing around had gotten water on the lenses of his glasses; the light refracts through them, little bright orbs in front of his eyes. 

“They’re already wet.”

Louis looks back to Henri; at the water throwing the sunlight back onto his face in a pale upside-down halo; at the freckles on his shoulders and the drowning face of the pretty girl on his bicep; at his eyes, bright and blue against his summer tan. His heart pushes its hands against his ribcage, yearning. “I’m happy like this,” he murmurs, and Henri shrugs.

“Suit yourself.” Then he lets go of Louis’ waist, and for a moment he’s adrift, river water in his mouth and riverbed much further than just a few inches from his feet. 

Louis imagines a freak current catching him as a fish flits slimy against his calf, and he curls his knees to his chest, foetal in the cool hands of the water. Again his eyes flick down the length of the river, from tree line to bend to opposite bank to their own now-faraway picnic. He’s so unused to being watched that he thinks he’s imagining it, some attempt on his brain’s part to retain some normalcy. Still, no faces peek from the trees. No flash of suntanning bare skin or anybody to see them fooling around in their underwear. Treading water now, he turns, a bad little doggy paddle to where Henri is drifting on his back, face radiant and upturned to the sun. 

“You’re gonna burn,” Louis murmurs, moving so close that they bump together, that he sends Henri floating off course. He grins, and doesn’t open his eyes.

“I don’t burn.” His hand catches at Louis’; touching shoulder, bicep, wrist. Henri pulls him in. One eye cracks open. “You look handsome.”

Louis scoffs, unsure how to respond to that so he doesn’t, just flicks some water at Henri in a way he hopes is something playful. “You are.” But Henri isn’t listening, back to drifting, like what he’d needed to do is done. Louis watches him a moment longer, waiting, and then touches a wet hand to his own overheated face. 

He gets out of the water before Henri does, his body’s core brought down enough that he finds himself wanting to warm right back up again. He soaks a wet patch right through the blanket before the sun manages to dry him off, and then shifts covertly to Henri’s side, eyes on the man still treading cool green water in front of him. 

He wants him to get out. He wants to kiss him. Here, in this place with no eyes and no ears. Now that he’s had a taste of it Louis finds he can’t stop thinking about it; more than the sex, more than that by far. The easy affection in how Henri had kissed him over their morning coffee, the way he’d curled around Louis’ body as they slept and hadn’t let him go all night. Company, is that what it is? No. Something deeper, something as wide and deep and fast moving as this river. Louis feels stranded on the riverbank of that feeling. 

His hands move on reflex to the bag he’d brought from the car, shifting aside the warming fruits at the bottom to gather up his pencils, fallen from their tin, his sketchbook making its home on his knees. It’s not a bad stranding. He doesn’t want to cross the river; only to observe it. A few feet away Henri is shining like a brand new penny and Louis thinks, _I’ve never seen the sun love somebody like it loves you._

—————

When Louis wakes, the sun is low over the tree line of the opposite bank of the river, and Henri is emerged from the water, and dry. Sitting nearby; smelling like sun, like warm skin. Dreamily, Louis rolls over onto his side, the rock hard under him, and presses his forehead to Henri’s thigh. Nothing like falling asleep with the sun on your face. Nothing in the world like it.

Henri’s hand comes to scratch idly through Louis’ hair, and he hums, shifting a little so he can fling an arm over Henri’s lap. Louis still feels boneless with the heat, with the sleep he’s barely come up out of yet, but at the touch of his fingers to familiar heavy paper, he jerks upright, shock a soaring shell in his chest. 

“What are you doing?” he asks, though it’s so obvious that Henri just blinks at him, bemused. Louis’ sketchbook, open in his hands, Henri’s own face handsome and serious and staring up into the light. Voice and eyes still gritty with sleep, Louis tugs the sketchbook from Henri’s lap, snapping, “That’s not yours.” 

Henri still has that open expression of confusion on his face, eyebrows drawn together and hands empty on his crossed legs as he watches Louis snap the book shut and re-tie the cord that keeps it closed. “You left it open,” he murmurs, “I thought you wanted me to see.”

Louis can’t meet his eyes, fussing with putting the book back amongst the dregs of their picnic as his ears burn with shame. God, those sentimental, midnight sketches. “I fell asleep drawing.”

“You’re a beautiful artist,” Henri says, as though that’s supposed to make it better. Louis is so full up with embarrassment that it feels like it’s leaking right out of his eyes, his ears, so much so that he doesn’t even register the compliment. And then, salt in the wound, “You draw me far more handsome than I am.” A laugh follows it. Louis groans, and surrenders his face to his palms. 

“Please forget you ever saw those,” he mutters, lifting his head up just so he can shove at Henri’s arm. “And don’t go through my things.”

Henri’s face blooms in a smile, pleased at first and then snapping quickly to impish. Louis rolls his eyes, face still feeling very hot, as Henri says, “Oh, so you’re allowed to but I’m not?” The smile is the only thing edging his words from meanness, or pettiness. He reaches out chuck Louis under the chin. “I see you pullin’ the cottage apart with your eyes.”

“Isn’t the same,” Louis says, shortly, but Henri’s inability to really let a bad mood sink in is taking effect. When Henri’s hand comes close to pinch at his cheek, Louis dodges it, a grudging smile pulling at his mouth. “C’mon, stop. I’m annoyed at you.”

“You ain’t that annoyed,” Henri murmurs, fondly. And then, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was off limits.”

Louis gives in to the light touch of Henri’s fingertips to the back of his hand, balled into a fist on his knee. He uncurls it, lets Henri squeeze his fingers. “How’d you feel if I…” he fumbles for a comparison, and then remembers. The typewriter, the little toolshed turned cosy study. “Read the first draft of your book?” Somewhere above them a cicada starts up, its high whine rising and falling with the breeze. Henri smiles.

“I wouldn’t mind it,” he says, easily. Then he winks. “I don’t have a lotta shame.”

“That’s obvious,” Louis mumbles, and the cicada fills the silence that draws between them. Louis squeezes at Henri’s fingers, smiling as he squeezes back. A breeze toys with the short, fluffy strands of Henri’s hair, sticking up all wild after his swim, and Louis could roll his eyes at the itch that rises in him to capture it, draw it, if it wasn’t for Henri’s gaze like a pin through his skull.

Gently, Henri says, “You really have something, y’know.” And Louis cuts his eyes away, ears burning again. Henri laughs, a soft huff of breath. “You keep surprising me. Nobody’s ever drawn me before.”

Louis flops onto his back just to avoid Henri’s scrutiny, screwing his eyes shut at the bright sun above them. “I’m not that surprising,” he murmurs. “And I bet loads of people have drawn you.”

“Maybe a courtroom artist,” Henri jokes, and Louis groans, unable to keep from laughing. 

“That’s awful, Henri.”

“Hey, if you can’t make light of it.” He settles down next to Louis, hands behind his head as he makes himself comfortable. Louis glances at him out of the corner of his eye, considering.

“Do I really surprise you?”

Henri hums, rolling his head to the side so they can lock eyes. Louis holds his gaze, feeling oddly daring for it. “Of course you do,” Henri says, and his mouth quirks. “I got the wrong read on you when we first met, so. Kinda inevitable.”

Louis blinks, surprised. “You did?” He thinks back on that day Henri had moved in, bare feet against the sun-warmed wood of the porch, embarrassment prickly and hot on the back of his neck. He remembers how standoffish and disinterested Henri had been with him, and flushes as he realises it wasn’t all his own skewed perception. “I knew I made a bad first impression,” he adds. “I knew it!”

Henri laughs, but doesn’t disagree. “Didn’t take me long to work out I got you figured wrong, though.”

“When?”

Henri snorts, and looks away, throws a hand over his face to block the sun from his eyes. His sunglasses sit a foot away; too far away to reach. “When I caught you wandering ‘round in the pourin’ fuckin’ rain,” he says, wicked amusement in his voice. “Little drowned rat. Knew then you weren’t like your dad, or your mama.” He pauses, and Louis waits, wanting to see if the silence will pull more out of him. He feels on the edge of his seat, eyes on what little he can see of Henri’s face just to not miss even the tiniest shift of emotion there. “Then I knew again when you said you were sorry for talkin’ stupid about my past. That’s when I really knew.”

“How long did you know you wanted me?” Louis breathes, speaking low so as not to upset the seemingly fragile balance between them. Henri is not normally so verbose, so serious. Louis feels like he’s taking all this new information in hungrily, without pause. He just wants more and more, to keep prompting it from Henri’s mouth.

Henri glances at him, slyness in the line of his mouth. “Why’re you askin’ so much?”

“Can you blame me?” He holds Henri’s gaze, pleased as he sees Henri’s smile soften.

“I wanted you from the minute you gave a better handshake than I can give,” he murmurs, and rolls onto his belly so he can catch Louis’ mouth in a kiss; heated, the graze of his teeth and then his tongue. Louis makes a noise against his mouth, fingers finding their home in the short crop of Henri’s halo of hair. Then he breaks away, grinning. “From the minute I saw you standin’ there in the doorway like you seen a ghost.”

“Took your damn time,” Louis mutters, scratching his fingernails over Henri’s nape just to see him shiver. “Didn’t you?”

Henri makes a noncommittal noise, and kisses Louis again. “Put it outta my head. Didn’t see anythin’ happenin’ with us until that afternoon out in the car with you.”

Louis hums, and flops back against the sun-warmed rock underneath them, something unbearably light unfolding in his chest. He can feel the big, stupid grin stretching his face, but can’t do anything to reel it in. Not with Henri looking at him with those warm, blue eyes, not with his body pressed up close to his own, the easy affection and attraction between them. Henri pokes at his cheek.

“What’re you thinking about?”

The water sloshes against the bank, and Louis turns his eyes to the pines towering just out of sight, squinting against the sunlight. “You make me feel something,” he says, feeling brave. Henri slings his arm over Louis’ stomach, presses up close to his side. “Something unfamiliar, something I don’t know what to do with.”

Henri makes a curious noise. “Well, what d’you _wanna_ do with it?”

Louis doesn’t reply for a while, musing the question over in his head. He hasn’t thought of it so simply before; each time he’s even settled near the topic it’s immediately threatened to spin out into something far greater and far scarier than it really is. Always, thoughts of his parents. His father’s continuing disappointment versus his mother’s quiet, bitter distaste for him. He doesn’t know how to separate the things he wants from the way he knows they would react. Like art school; enrolling in his undergrad at twenty-one because it took so long to broach the subject to his parents for fear of what they would say about it. But maybe it really can be so simple; maybe he really can just follow his nose for once in his life and see what he might fetch up against at the end. He sighs, and Henri makes a noise against his chest, his big, sweet head pillowed over the thud of Louis’ anxious heart. 

“I wanna kiss you,” he begins, slow. It’s hard to voice the desires that have been storing up inside him for weeks. Hard to draw them from their keeping-places. “I wanna sleep in the same bed as you. I wanna stay by this river and I don’t wanna go back there.”

Henri mumbles a laugh, and presses a kiss to Louis’ chest before he shifts to tuck his face in close to his neck. “I think I can manage a couple of those things.” No mention of Maurice, of Celeste, no mention of the tenuous peace that seems to always hang over the house. Just that: an agreement, a joke, as light as the heart in Louis’ ribcage. 

“Is it really that easy?” he breathes, turning his face towards Henri, who snorts. His skin is warm to the touch when Louis grasps at his shoulder, squeezing a little as though just to make sure this is real. The water, the sun, the soft kiss Henri presses to Louis’ mouth.

“It’s as easy as you wanna make it,” he murmurs, and Louis kisses him again, lets the rest of their afternoon melt away as easily as ice in the sun.

——————

Henri drives home, with Louis in the passenger seat making a real meal out of rolling a cigarette from Henri’s pouch. He laughs long and loud when he sees the thing; crooked, fat, leaking tobacco, but sparks his lighter against the end nonetheless. 

“We’ll get you taught,” he says, paper burning away far too fast, fluttering around the front of the car as Henri steps on the accelerator on those long, endless country roads. The sunflowers watch them go, heads dipped in passing. Louis has to bite his lip at the pleasure just that promise gives rise to inside him. 

The pleased feeling lasts the whole way home, warm in the seat with the smell of the countryside rushing through the open windows, the radio dipping in and out of signal as they drive. Once they turn into the village a tight feeling starts to develop in his chest, the vice squeezing him tighter and tighter with every turn they take that gets them closer to that hill, those gates, and the house beyond. And Louis can’t verbalise it, can’t bear to break the atmosphere of their afternoon with this fear as old as he is, not when everything had been so seemingly resolved. He thinks of their riverside kisses, the breeze bringing with it the coolness of the water, the lightness in his chest that he thought would never lift.

The gates loom in the distance, huge and dark and foreboding. Henri’s hand settles on Louis’ knee for an instant, squeezing, and then it’s gone, back to the gearshift as they pass through the gates.

His father’s car is pulled in next to his mother’s untouched Corvette. Louis tries to swallow around the defeated feeling blooming in him. It was childish, to think things could change. The knowledge that the thing which needs to is in himself is sobering; he wouldn’t know how to fix it if he tried.

As if sensing Louis’ quiet, internal spiral, Henri pulls his car in next to Louis’ father’s, and turns to him. His face is open, handsome, but Louis finds he can’t make eye contact. He stares at his hands in his lap, trying to find the will to be as brave as he’d felt at the river. 

“What’s wrong?”

The car idles noisily around them. With a grunt, Henri pulls the keys from the ignition, and it quiets. Louis clears his throat, twists his hands together on his knees.

“It doesn’t feel as easy as it did earlier.”

To his shock, Henri laughs. Louis blinks at him, nonplussed, inching further into the corner between seat and car door as Henri shakes his head, and reaches down to ratchet his seat back from the pedals. “How could it?” he asks, and at Louis’ blank expression, his brows draw together, and he sobers. “Louis, it ain’t easy. That’s the point.”

Beyond the open car windows, the familiar sounds and smells of home filter through. They’re different than those that come in through Henri’s window, the big wide one above his bed. Smells become sweeter there, sounds more soft. Dimly, Louis murmurs, “I don’t understand.” 

Henri settles back into his seat, big in the small space. He still smells like the river, like a day spent in the sun, and all Louis wants to do is grab the wheel from him and turn back the way they came. Camp out in one of those sunflower fields and eat their seeds for food. Rain for their water and the sky to be their ceiling. And Louis thinks that Henri must see something in his face, because his own expression softens, and he drops his gaze. Picks at a loose thread at the stitching on his jeans. 

“Nothin’ hard is easy,” he says, slow, like he’s dragging the words out from inside himself. Like he’s saying the words as they appear in his head. “You can do all those things you wanna do but they’re gonna be hard unless you decide to make ‘em easy. Only person who can do that is you.” Then he pauses, for so long that Louis almost speaks. But he waits, sweat prickling his brow as the car grows hotter around them. Until finally, Henri adds, “Ain’t nothin’ gonna be easy until you’re ready for it.”

“Okay,” Louis says, and lays a hand over the nervous way Henri is plucking at that loose thread. He thinks of that conversation, weeks ago, his late-night apology and what it had led to. “Was it hard starting out again for you?” he asks, and Henri’s expression flickers. Only for a second, but Louis sees it. 

Then Henri smiles, and flips his hand over to squeeze at Louis’ fingers. “Only for as long as I made it,” he murmurs, caught from behind in the golden light of the sinking sun, beautiful and shining and out the other side from his own hard thing. 

Then, like a baby bird pecking its beak through the shell to fresh air, Louis feels a flutter of that previous bravery unfold in his chest. Suddenly, the gates they’ve just driven through don’t seem so big. The house doesn’t seem so dark and shuttered up against him. The cottage not so far away.

Slowly, he smiles, and Henri grins right back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading!! and thank u for your lovely comments on the first chapter too, i felt so unsure of posting this because i wasn't sure anyone would really even care for such a huge fic in such a little fandom but... :''') u are all so kind!

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!! i will upload the other half of the fic next week :~) i hope you enjoyed, i feel like i've been writing this fic on and off for MONTHS so i'm really happy to have it out here, and i know the papillon fandom is small but i hope my Humble contribution is welcome.. :~)!!!!


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